Windows Password Recovery - attacking hashes

Currently the program can decrypt Windows hashes in several ways. Confused about what attack to select to recover your passwords? Take a look at our article on recovering password from hashes.

Smart attacks

Preliminary attack (developed by Passcape Software) The recovery method is based upon a social engineering method and consists of several sub attacks. Preliminary attack is very fast and often it is used for guessing simple and short passwords when there's no need to launch a fully scalable attack. Read more...

Artificial Intelligence attack (developed by Passcape Software) This is a brand-new type of attack developed in our company. It is based upon a social engineering method and allows, without resort to time-consuming and costly computations, to almost instantly and painless recover certain passwords. Read more...

Fingerprint attack (developed by Passcape, original idea by Atom) The attack parses input wordlist to generate so-called "fingerprints" used to recover the password. The attack is quite effective in finding difficult passwords for big list of hashes or for password history hashes. Read more...

Online recovery (developed by Passcape Software) Searches passwords in Internet databases. It deals fairly well with simple and frequently-used passwords. Its drawback is low operating speed and poor suitability for handling large hash lists. Read more...

Passcape Rainbow Table attack (developed by Passcape Software) It's the next generation of regular pre-calculated tables. Passcape table attack is most suitable for recovering complex and strong passwords of unlimited length. Read more...

Common attacks

Brute-force attack Tries all possible combinations from the specified range of characters. For example, for a three-character range of lower-case Latin characters, it will check all possible combinations, starting with 'aaa', 'aab', 'aac', and all the way through 'zzz'. This is the slowest attack, so it is really great for short passwords. Read more...

Dictionary attack It is the most efficient recovery method, when the program tries each word from the dictionary (or dictionaries if there are several dictionaries) you specify until it finds the original password or until the wordlist is out of words. This method is very efficient since many people use regular words or phrases for their passwords. Besides this type of recovery is performed quite fast compared to brute-force attack, for instance. Additional dictionaries and word-lists can be downloaded from our site or can be ordered on CDs. Read more...

Mask attack It is a variation of the brute-force attack, except that some characters for finding the password remain unchanged, and only a portion of the password may change. The special syntax is used for setting a mask or rule for finding a password. Read more...

Advanced attacks

Base-word attack (developed by Passcape Software) At the first glance, this type of attack reminds the one we just described above. It is just as efficient if a portion of the password to be recovered is known to us. However, unlike in the previous attack, here you do not have to set a mask - just provide a basic word. The program will take care of the rest. The phrase attack is based upon the experience of the social engineering to generate a great number of possible combinations of the given original word. Read more...

Combined dictionary attack (developed by Passcape Software) The combo attack uses to find compound passwords. For example, 'nothingtodo' or 'I give up'. It is very similar to the dictionary attack, except that instead of using a single word for password verification it uses a combination of words created by combining words from several dictionaries. You can create your own password generation rules. Read more...

Phrase attack (developed by Passcape Software) The phrase attack is very efficient against complex passwords. The idea of it is to guess the right password by searching through frequently used phrases and combinations. You can download pass-phrase wordlists and dictionaries from our site only! Read more...

Rainbow attack It is a time-memory tradeoff used in recovering the plaintext password from hashes. This attack is quite fast and effective tool for auditing Windows hashes. Read more...

Hybrid dictionary attack It is like a simple dictionary attack, except that it allows a user to customize word mutation and set your own password mutation rules. The rule definition syntax is compatible with some other password recovery software. Read more...

GPU-based attacks

GPU Brute-force attack the attack is fully identical to simple brute-force except that to guess passwords, it uses video card instead of CPU. The GPU device to be run the attack on, should be set in 'General Options'. Read more...

Other

Batch attack (developed by Passcape Software) The batch attack creates a list of attacks to be run one-by-one, so that you could launch all those attacks with a single mouse-click instead of configuring each of them individually. Read more...