Hashcat Tool in Kali Linux

Hashcat is famous as the fastest password cracker and password recovery utility. Hashcat is designed to break or crack even the most complex passwords in a very short amount of time.

Working Of Hashcat

Usually Hashcat tool comes pre-installed with Kali Linux, but if we need to install it, write down the given command in the terminal.

sudo apt-get install hashcat

Now, you can find the hashcat Tool in Password Cracking Tools :

We are going to perform Dictionary Attack to crack Password in this article.

1. Creating Hash Entries

These entries will then be outputted to a file called “Dictionary_hashes”. 

• -n: This option removes the new line added to the end of entries as we don’t want the newline characters to be hashed with our entries.
• tr -d: This option removes any characters that are a space or hyphen from the output.

2. Checking the stored Hashes

We can check the stored hashes with the help of the below command :

cat Dictionary_hashes.txt

Some password hashes that can be cracked with hashcat can be seen below :

3.  Choose the wordlists

We are going to use the “rockyou” wordlist.

4. Cracking the Hashes

Now we can crack the hashes that we stored in Dictionary_hashes.txt and we will store the result in the Done.txt file.

5. Results

Now we can see the results stored in the Done.txt file by the below command:

cat Done.txt

Features of hashcat

Here’s a clear list of the features of Hashcat

• The 90+ Algorithm can be implemented with performance and optimization in mind.
• The number of threads can be configured.
• Hashcat is a multi-algorithm based ( MD5, MD4, MySQL, SHA1, NTLM, DCC, etc.).
• All attacks can be extended by specialized rules.
• It is multi-hash and multi-OS-based (Windows and Linux).
• It supports both hex-charset and hex-salt files.

Use Cases

Here are some of the use cases of the Hashcat Tool

• Password Recovery: For individuals or organizations that need to recover lost or forgotten access.
• Penetration Testing: To identify weak or guessable passwords in systems.
• Digital Forensics: Law enforcement or investigators use it in cybercrime cases.
• Research & Training: To understand password strength and cracking methods.