Security Glossary

Hashcat

The world's fastest GPU-accelerated password recovery tool, supporting hundreds of hash types and multiple attack modes.

Hashcat is the world's fastest password recovery tool, using GPU acceleration to crack password hashes. It supports hundreds of hash types and multiple attack modes.

Attack Modes

-a 0  Dictionary attack
-a 1  Combination attack
-a 3  Brute-force/mask attack
-a 6  Hybrid wordlist + mask
-a 7  Hybrid mask + wordlist

Basic Usage

# Dictionary attack on MD5
hashcat -m 0 hashes.txt wordlist.txt

# Brute force with mask
hashcat -m 0 hashes.txt -a 3 ?a?a?a?a?a?a

# bcrypt with wordlist and rules
hashcat -m 3200 hashes.txt wordlist.txt -r rules/best64.rule

# Show cracked passwords
hashcat -m 0 hashes.txt --show

Common Hash Modes

-m 0      MD5
-m 100    SHA1
-m 1000   NTLM (Windows)
-m 1800   sha512crypt (Linux)
-m 3200   bcrypt
-m 13100  Kerberos TGS-REP
-m 18200  Kerberos AS-REP

Mask Characters

?l  lowercase (a-z)
?u  uppercase (A-Z)
?d  digits (0-9)
?s  special characters
?a  all printable ASCII

Example: ?u?l?l?l?d?d?d?d (Password1234)

Rules

Rules transform wordlist entries to generate variations:

:     No operation
l     Lowercase all
u     Uppercase all
c     Capitalize first
$1    Append "1"
^!    Prepend "!"