Summary

In this chapter, we introduced you to rules for both John and hashcat, which allow us to take a list of candidates and perform substitutions and manipulations that are commonly performed when users are forced to choose passwords that are, by their requirements, hard to remember. Carefully selecting the right rules for a cracking operation can make a huge difference in the amount of credentials recovered.

In Part 2, we will learn about cracking specific types of hashes, how they work, how they are constructed, how to retrieve them, and how to crack them. The chapters in Part 2 are designed to be more or less standalone – you do not need to read through all of them at once, just reference the ones you need as you need them. With that, let’s start discussing specific hash types.