<p>Ethical hacking often involves password theft. Red teams, for example, test passwords for policy weaknesses, common password use and password reuse across accounts. Blue teams test passwords for audits, compliance and digital forensics.</p>
<p>In many cases, passwords retrieved by ethical hackers are in an obfuscated format known as a <i>hash</i>, usually as part of a large database of every user on the compromised system or network. To read these passwords as plaintext, hackers need to use a process known as <a href=”https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/password-cracker”><i>cracking</i></a>, which requires a lot of processing power.</p>
<p>Many hackers use Hashcat among other password recovery and cracking tools. This easy-to-use tool uses a computer’s GPU for resource efficiency and speed.</p>
<p>Follow along in this tutorial to learn how to use Hashcat.</p>
<section class=”section main-article-chapter” data-menu-title=”Download and run Hashcat”>
<h2 class=”section-title”><i class=”icon” data-icon=”1″></i>Download and run Hashcat</h2>
<p>Download the tool from the <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hashcat.net/hashcat/” rel=”noopener”>Hashcat site</a> and extract it into a directory of your choice.</p>
<p>Launch the tool from the command line by navigating to the directory you extracted it to and typing the following command:</p>
<pre><span style=”font-family: ‘courier new’, courier, monospace;”>hashcat.exe –help</span></pre>
<p>This populates a list of possible commands, but only a few of them are needed to get started.</p>
</section>
<section class=”section main-article-chapter” data-menu-title=”How to crack passwords with Hashcat”>
<h2 class=”section-title”><i class=”icon” data-icon=”1″></i>How to crack passwords with Hashcat</h2>
<p>Open the command prompt and use the following syntax:</p>
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<img data-src=”https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/hashcat-image1-h_mobile.jpg” class=”lazy” data-srcset=”https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/hashcat-image1-h_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/hashcat-image1-h.jpg 1280w
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