hashcat

hashcat is the world's fastest password cracker and one of the most widely used password crackers, too. To do so, hashcat takes full advantage of your PC's hardware, including the graphics card. Using hashcat with a powerful GPU is the key to its performance since graphics cards are excellent at parallelizing tasks, and password cracking is the perfect task for parallelizing.

hashcat allows all kinds of methods when trying to crack a password. The most common methods are dictionary attacks, which use files with millions of words to generate a hash and match it against the password you're trying to crack. As soon as a match is made, you'll have the password in question.

If a dictionary attack doesn't work, then brute force is the next best option. With hashcat, this method can be used in a general or specific way. In a general way, you'll start by trying all kinds of words and various combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols. However, performing a brute-force attack with several prior parameters in place is also possible. For example, if you know that a password is 12 characters long, you can set a parameter to test passwords of that length.

Other possible attacks include association attacks, in which hashcat generates passwords based on information that may have influenced the creation of the password.

hashcat supports virtually every encryption algorithm in the world, including MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, AES-256, WPA, bcrypt, VeraCrypt, BitLocker, Bitwarden, and many more. It can also be used for archives encrypted with 7-ZIP, WinZip, or WinRAR.

To use hashcat, you can use graphics cards from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. NVIDIA's have the best performance thanks to the use of CUDA. To use hashcat, you'll need to copy the Command Prompt executable (cmd.exe) to the folder where the hashcat.exe file is located. Then run hashcat.exe, after which you can use the commands to decrypt passwords.

If you want to check the security of a certain password or recover a forgotten password, downloading hashcat is the best option out there.