Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook - Second Edition

Cracking password hashes via Brute Force using Hashcat

In recent years, the development of graphics cards has evolved enormously; the chips they include now have hundreds or thousands of processors inside them and all of them work in parallel. This, when applied to password cracking, means that if a single processor can calculate 10,000 hashes in a second, one GPU with 1,000 cores can do up to 10 million. That means reducing cracking times by a factor of 1,000 or more.

In this recipe, we will use Hashcat to crack hashes by brute force. This will work only if you have Kali Linux installed as a base system on a computer with an Nvidia or ATI chipset. If you have Kali Linux on a virtual machine, GPU cracking may not work, but you can always ...