Password Attacks and Cracking Flashcards

Which Hashcat attack mode uses a wordlist combined with rules to generate password candidates?

Answer: Wordlist mode with rules (-a 0 -r)

Hashcat's straight/wordlist mode (-a 0) paired with a rules file (-r) applies transformations like capitalization and substitutions to each word in the list.

What is the primary difference between a dictionary attack and a brute-force attack?

Answer: Dictionary attacks use a predefined list of words while brute-force tries all character combinations

A dictionary attack tests passwords from a predefined wordlist, while brute-force exhaustively tries every possible combination of characters.

Which tool is specifically designed for online password attacks against services like SSH and FTP?

Answer: Hydra

Hydra is a parallelized network login cracker that supports online brute-force attacks against protocols like SSH, FTP, HTTP, and many others.

What does the rockyou.txt wordlist contain?

Answer: Plaintext passwords leaked from the 2009 RockYou data breach

rockyou.txt contains approximately 14 million plaintext passwords leaked from the 2009 RockYou social game company data breach.

In a pass-the-hash attack, what is actually passed to authenticate?

Answer: The NTLM hash of the password

Pass-the-hash attacks use the captured NTLM hash directly to authenticate to Windows services without needing to crack it to plaintext.

Which Linux file contains hashed user passwords in modern systems?

Answer: /etc/shadow

Modern Linux systems store hashed passwords in /etc/shadow, which is only readable by root, unlike /etc/passwd which is world-readable.

What is a rainbow table attack?

Answer: A precomputed table of hash-to-plaintext mappings used to reverse hashes quickly

Rainbow tables are precomputed lookup tables mapping hash values to their original plaintexts, trading storage space for cracking speed.