Brute force with hashcat

[carollinney]

Starting to learn hashcat and I wanted to brute force a hashed MD5 password.

I used the command

hashcat -m 0 hash -a 3 ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a ‐‐increment

Which should start at 7 characters and increment. I ran this on a cloud GPU system with four Nvidia 4090’s and it said it would take less than 5 minutes to crack. However it finished with “exhausted” and wasn’t able to crack them. I tried generating other simple password hashes to test but still no luck.

Why wasn’t brute force able to crack them despite it finishing? Shouldn’t it have gone through every possible combination if it had finished?

[buka]

hashcat -m 0 hash -a 3 ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a ‐‐increment

Which should start at 7 characters and increment.

No, it shouldn't. Someone has misinformed you.

[174region174]

hashcat -m 0 hash -a 3 ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a ‐‐increment

Which should start at 7 characters and increment.

No, it shouldn't. Someone has misinformed you.

hashcat -m 0 hash -a 3 -i --increment-min=7 ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a

[carollinney]

smash karts

hashcat -m 0 hash -a 3 ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a ‐‐increment

Which should start at 7 characters and increment.

No, it shouldn't. Someone has misinformed you.

Really, so sad