John and Hashcat Rules
As we have seen, John and hashcat can be used to perform various types of cracking attacks against credentials. However, brute-force style or mask attacks can be overly time-consuming, and wordlist-based (or dictionary) attacks may result in fewer cracked credentials when they are not present in the wordlist.
To try and move in between these two extremes, we can use rules, which are a way of taking a source list of candidates for cracking (such as a wordlist) and modifying those candidates to increase the likelihood of successful cracking. These modifications can be simple, such as capitalizing the first character of a candidate or adding a number to the end of a candidate. On the other hand, we can also engage in significant substitutions from the original candidate.
As an important note, all links and URLs are correct at the time of writing. Things can and do move about the internet at times – luckily, common code repositories such as GitHub have...
