Attack mode 6 and 7 give vastly different speeds

[philsmd]

you could try to think about alternatives, like rule based attacks (https://hashcat.net/wiki/?id=rule_based_attack)

Code:

hashcat64.exe --stdout -a 3 -o my.rules ^^?a

note: here I assume that the rule ^x will be put in the file my.rules, for each x in ?a. I think on windows you need to escape a ^ on the command line with ^^ but I could be wrong (the rule is just ^y for prepending the character y)

Code:

hashcat64.exe -m 1000 --username -a 0 -O -w 3 -r my.rules NTLM.txt "C:\Wordlists\crackstation.txt\realuniq.lst"

or other clever alternatives...


btw: I'm not saying that it must be faster, but you will see the speed difference and come up with maybe other alternatives yourself. also note that such workarounds/tricks only make sense for very specific inputs (in this case a very small mask ?a), it's not true/faster all the time, of course.