Password Cracking with Kali Linux

Masks

Before we go further, it is important to understand what masks are in password cracking. Regular brute force attacks are outdated, masks bring a level of intelligence to our brute force attempts. In essence, a mask is just a symbolic list of characters you want to use in any type of brute force attack. 

You can use:

• ?l – lowercase
• ?u – uppercase
• ?s – symbol
• ?d – numbers
• ?h – 0-9, and letters “a-f”
• ?H – numbers 0-9, and letters “A-F”
• ?a – Any number, letter, or symbol
• ?b – Binary – Every hex character from 00 to ff