special character problem with standarad hash generators

[atom]

If you know for example that the hash has been generated using utf8 you could run your wordlist through iconv. hashcat does not know about encoding, it reads the data bytewise. If you feed it with utf8 data, it will crack utf8, if you feed it with iso-5589-1 it will crack iso-8859-1. There's also a possibility to crack utf-8 with masks, i think rurapenthe wrote about this on his blog some time ago