One of the most educational experiences I've had with hashcat was when I did this:
* working a large general list using all of the techniques that I knew,
* running PRINCE, random rules, or junk wordlists against the remaining hashes,
* studying why I had missed the new founds,
* and adding general attacks for those new founds to my list of techniques - repeat as needed.
This is very empowering because you can dig into the emerging patterns yourself - it's self-propelled.
It also matters to put your list of techniques in order by efficiency, and to study how to scientifically measure that efficiency using --debug-mode (to see which rules are working) and --outfiles plus the 'crackpos' value (to see how many attempts it took to find your plain).
* working a large general list using all of the techniques that I knew,
* running PRINCE, random rules, or junk wordlists against the remaining hashes,
* studying why I had missed the new founds,
* and adding general attacks for those new founds to my list of techniques - repeat as needed.
This is very empowering because you can dig into the emerging patterns yourself - it's self-propelled.
It also matters to put your list of techniques in order by efficiency, and to study how to scientifically measure that efficiency using --debug-mode (to see which rules are working) and --outfiles plus the 'crackpos' value (to see how many attempts it took to find your plain).
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