Installing hashcat
Hashcat has become a great alternative for password cracking work over the past years and excels at GPU-based cracking. While cracking via the GPU cannot be accelerated for all hashing algorithms, hashcat can still introduce significant improvements in many cases.
Where hashcat truly excels is with its ability to leverage GPUs for its various password-cracking activities. The faster the GPU, the faster hashcat can crack passwords. This is the case for both AMD and NVIDIA-based GPUs, though performance on different hashing algorithms can vary significantly. To take advantage of hashcat’s strengths, we will need a GPU, which is outside the scope of this book. Given that most individuals will use stronger GPUs for other tasks such as gaming at least periodically, we will perform our hashcat installation on Windows instead of Linux. Thankfully, hashcat provides pre-compiled binaries for the Windows platform.
The binaries for hashcat can be found at https...
