Published: 15 December 2022    Last Updated: 16 December 2022

A couple of years ago I wrote an article about hashcracking with Hashcat and AWS; but that was back on Ubuntu 16.04 and it involved manually compiling the packages. So I thought I’d best update it for Ubuntu 22.04 and why not use the Nvidia ubuntu repos to make things easier too.

Published: 06 August 2021    Last Updated: 03 November 2022

Whilst Hashcat is often provable faster than John the Ripper, John is still my favourite. I find it simple to use, fast and the jumbo community patch (which I recommend highly) comes packed with hash types making it a versatile tool.

One of the features of these tools, which is often unknown or at least under appreciated is the ability to create custom “rules” for teaching the tool how to dynamically generate potential passwords. Since Microsoft implemented “Password Complexity” and this was enforced around the globe, user have made the jump from a password of: password, to the [sarcasm] much more secure [/sarcasm]: Password1.

Published: 19 October 2020    Last Updated: 15 December 2022

Password cracking is a common step during compromising networks, from cracking wireless networks to compromising user passwords captured when LLMNR spoofing. In a previous post, I showed the steps to capture a WPA handshake and crack it using Hashcat. On my tiny travel laptop I achieved 416 hashes per second, which is…slow. AWS offers “GPU Optimized” EC2 instances which can offer a significant speed increase. 

In this post we'll run through setting up Hashcat on an AWS instance to allow for rapid password cracking. These instances are pricey, but you often only need to run them for short bursts.