Hashcat: Advanced Password Recovery

Hashcat is the world's fastest and most advanced password recovery utility, supporting five unique modes of attack for over 300 highly-optimized hashing algorithms.

Attack Modes

• Dictionary Attack (-a 0): Uses a wordlist
• Combination Attack (-a 1): Combines two wordlists
• Brute-Force Attack (-a 3): Tries all combinations
• Rule-Based Attack (-a 0 -r): Applies rules to wordlist entries
• Hybrid Attack (-a 6 / -a 7): Combines wordlist + mask

Common Usage

# MD5 Dictionary Attack
hashcat -m 0 -a 0 hash.txt wordlist.txt

SHA-256 with rules
hashcat -m 1400 -a 0 hash.txt wordlist.txt -r rules/best64.rule

Brute-force (8 char)
hashcat -m 0 -a 3 hash.txt ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a

Show cracked
hashcat -m 0 hash.txt --show

Common Hash Modes