Test And Recover Your Passwords By Cracking Them
Introduction
Hashcat is a robust password cracking tool that can help you recover lost passwords, audit password security, benchmark, or just figure out what data is stored in a hash.
There are a number of great password cracking utilities out there, but Hashcat is known for being efficient, powerful, and full featured. Hashcat makes use of GPUs to accelerate hash cracking. GPUs are much better and handling cryptographic work than CPUs are, and they can be utilized in much greater numbers than CPUs. Hashcat also supports a very wide range of popular hashes, to ensure that it can handle deciphering nearly any password.
Please note that misuse of this program can be illegal. Only test on systems that you own or have written permission to test on. Don’t share or post hashes or results publicly. Hashcat should be used for password recovery and professional security audits.
Getting Some Hashes
If you’re going to test out Hashcat’s hash cracking capabilities, you’re going to need some hashes to test with. Don’t do something crazy and start digging up encrypted user passwords on your computer or server. You can create some dummy ones for just this purpose.