(01-21-2019, 12:49 AM)mh1 Wrote: Thx Philsmd, you're right, after about a 2.5hr session (guess i have an slow GPU), hashcat "exhausted" and returned "candidates" not a "recoverd" password, I understand now.
So it seems I didn't crack the hash. In which case, is there a particular attack or something different that I should try next that is better for what I'm trying to do, should I be using a brute-force or mask attack instead of a dictionary attack? Or try dictionary again with a different wordlist? Is there a better wordlist I should use? I have downloaded a massive one (14GB) called "realuniq.lst" from crackstation, but I haven't tried it yet.
If I think the password could be a combination of letters and numbers (and possibly symbols) is the dictionary attack still the best to use?
If I do a mask attack, but I don't know the length of the password, is there a way to command hashcat to keep expanding the keyspace to try longer passwords?
As a side question Philsmd, where would I want to start if I wanted to start from scratch to learn more about this coding language in general (is it Python?)? Are there any good youtube tutorials/crash courses?
Thanks again for your time Philsmd.
Wordlists consist of commonly/most used passwords and their main point is to crack as many hashes as possible from big database dump for instance, because believe it or not people do use common passwords.
To explain this further, imagine that you have a wordlist with the password 'scorpion' on it, and now your victim uses 4 digit year number of their birth behind of it (scorpion1996), obviously you wouldnt crack it, since it isnt on your word list. It wouldnt even make sense to put all these combinations for 1 password on the wordlist.
In your case it would make sense to use masked or rule-based attack.
With masked attack you can set the increment with -i flag or use set of masks instead(.hcmask file).
Before you start learning a whole new coding language, I would suggest you learn how to use hashcat and its features first.
Everything you need is located here https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=hashcat or somewhere within these forums. Hope you have a nice day.