Hashcat Youtube Video

Searching for a faster Hashcat….

So while completing a room on THM recently, one thing i had to do was to crack a SHA-512 hash from the shadow file. This task got me thinking, How fast can someone like me get hashcat to run without having to go to the expense of a dedicated rig with multiple GPUS. While I would love that, I can’t really do that at the moment. The cost alone of this means id have to consider crypto mining and powering it from a street light! (Joking, please don’t ever try this!).

My first step, was to run this on my laptop which has a Ryzen 7 3700U. This is quite a competent mobile processor and to crack a SHA-512 with rockyou, it would take around 2 hours.

My second step was to try using the desktop, specifically the desktop’s RX580 GPU. This got the time down to 1 hour 49 minutes. This wasn’t really the speed increase I was seeking. So is there another way?

Hashcat in the clouds……

My first venture into hashcat on cloud was using google colab.

Luckily, on github, someone else had already had this idea and with a few modifications (Check the youtube video) I was away with running hashcat on the cloud.

GitHub Link – https://github.com/someshkar/colabcat

So with this running, it was estimating I’d have this done in 1 hour 10.

What did this actually crack it in? I actually achieved it in 34 minutes.

What’s Coming next?

Similarly to the way I’ve conducted this one, I’m going to the cloud for my next attempts and will be sharing the methods on here and youtube.

Also, while We’ve used hashcat for SHA-512 we are also going be throwing in some WPA2 bruteforce attacks next.

Keep checking the blog and subscribe to my youtube channel to catch part 2!

Thank you as always for reading and any question Contact Me

Marc