How to say that the password starts with "abc"

[yildiza]

I know that the password starts with specific characters.

How should I run hashcat so that it knows that the password starts with "abc"?

[philsmd]

What type of hashes do you use (there are salted hashes, where you can use abc as salt)?
What type of attack mode are you planning to use? for word list/dictionary attack you can just add a rule that prepends abc: ^c ^b ^a

[yildiza]

What type of hashes do you use (there are salted hashes, where you can use abc as salt)?
What type of attack mode are you planning to use? for word list/dictionary attack you can just add a rule that prepends abc: ^c ^b ^a

I'm trying to crack an MD5 hash with a mask attack. Is it possible?

[vagantis]

It is possible. Just use mask that starts with "abc", for example "abc?a?a?a". You can also use modifier "--increment", that way you can type one long mask (abc?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a) and hashcat will try to crack passwords of different length.