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f you are into password cracking, you might be aware of the fact that Hashcat is one of the most popular CPU-password recovery tools that is available for free. Hashcat is known for its speed and versatile nature to crack multiple types of hashes.

Now, going one step ahead, Hashcat has taken an important step of making Hashcat and oclHashcat open source. Hashcat is a CPU-based password recovery tool and oclHashcat is a GPU-accelerated tool.

In its latest blog post, Hashcat mentions the reasons behind this step. Whenever any software decides to go open source, the license matters the most. Hashcat used the MIT license, that allowed an easy integration or packaging of the common Linux distros, along with packages for Kali Linux.

Due to the adoption of open source path, now it’ll be easier to integrate external libraries in Hashcat. At the moment, hashcat/oclHashcat doesn’t need any external libraries, but if the need arises, now you’ve got the option.

Mentioning another major improvement, Hashcat writes that before going open source, there was no native support for OS X as Apple doesn’t support “offline” compiling of the kernel code. With open source license, now you can easily compile the kernels using Apple OpenCL Runtime JIT.

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According to the company, another inspiration for going open source was the implementation of bitsliced DES GPU kernels.

Hashcat offers multiple types of attack modes. Take a look:

Brute-Force attack

Combinator attack

Dictionary attack

Fingerprint attack

Hybrid attack

Mask attack

Permutation attack

Rule-based attack

Table-Lookup attack

Toggle-Case attack

PRINCE attack

Here’s the GitHub link: https://github.com/hashcat/

Willing to know more, visit the Hashcat website.

