tl;dr

When kicking off a hashcat session I’ve got my favorite dictionary/rule combo’s I always tend to lean on. Sometime’s when time’s against me I don’t want to run several sessions over long periods of time, so I often wonder during these one shot windows whether I’m setting myself up with the best chance of success.

To test this, I took a large variety of shipped hashcat rules along with a few others, and put them through the paces against a large data set. By pulling the stats of the top performing individual rules in each test and combining them, I created an optimised custom rule which when subsequently testing cracked several more than any of the original rule sets.

A complete write up of the testing and stats can be found on NotSoSecure’s blog, and the custom rule is also available on github so you can test it out for yourself 🙂