BOM markers and hidden characters in front of password

[philsmd]

you could just use rules to prepend the chars

Code:

^\xfe ^\xff

this can be used with the -j parameter directly or with a rule file (-r).

btw: it's important that the order is like mentioned above... first prepend the 0xfe char and afterwards prepend the 0xff byte to make sure that \xff is at the very beginning (yeah, reversed order when prepending with the ^ rule).
hint: you can also use the command

Code:

hashcat --stdout -j "^\xfe ^\xff" pwdlist.txt

to see what is going on (debug it), or create a new dict with redirect (>) or even better use the output (-o) command line argument to store/append it to a file . but yeah, it's true that storing it to a file doesn't make much sense, because hashcat gives an error if BOM is at the beginning of the dictionary file (so it's just for testing and making sure your rules work).