Hashing has two main purposes: the first is to put a fingerprint on a file so you can tell whether it has been altered, and the second is to conceal passwords so you can still recognize the correct password and enable login but a person who steals the hash cannot easily recover the password from it.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- MD5 and SHA hashes
- Windows password hashes
- Linux password hashes
- Challenge 1 – cracking Windows hashes
- Challenge 2 – cracking many-round hashes
- Challenge 3 – cracking Linux hashes