OSCP Password Attacks 2

Question 1

What is password spraying and why is it preferred over traditional brute force in Active Directory environments?

Accepted Answer

Using one common password against many accounts to stay below lockout thresholds

Answer

Password spraying tests a single common password (e.g., 'Password123!') across many accounts, avoiding per-account lockout thresholds.

Question 2

Which Hashcat flag is used to specify a rules file that applies transformations to wordlist entries?

Accepted Answer

-r

Answer

Hashcat's -r flag specifies a rules file containing transformation instructions such as capitalization, substitutions, and appending digits.

Question 3

What is the correct John the Ripper syntax to crack a hash file using a wordlist?

Accepted Answer

john --wordlist=wordlist.txt hashfile.txt

Answer

John the Ripper uses --wordlist= to specify the dictionary file, followed by the target hash file as a positional argument.

Question 4

Which authentication protocol is particularly vulnerable to pass-the-hash attacks?

Accepted Answer

NTLM

Answer

NTLM authentication can be bypassed by presenting a captured password hash directly, without ever cracking it to obtain the plaintext.

Question 5

What is the purpose of the rockyou.txt wordlist in password attacks?

Accepted Answer

It is a large compilation of real-world leaked passwords from a data breach

Answer

rockyou.txt was compiled from the 2009 RockYou data breach and contains over 14 million real passwords used by actual users.

OSCP Practice Test