The latest version of hashcat, oclHashcat-plus v0.15, was released over the weekend. It is, says lead developer Jens Steube under the handle Atom, the aftereffect of more than 6 months of work, having altered 618,473 aggregate lines of source code.
Hashcat is a freely available password cracker. It is obviously a double reason weapon: it can be utilized by security reviewers to stress-test organization passwords, and it can be utilized criminals to crack lists of stolen passwords. One of its biggest weaknesses had been a failure to deal with passwords consisting of more than 15 characters: as of now the new version can deal with passwords and phrases normally up to 55 characters long.
What the new version of hashcat exhibits is that size is no longer as vital as it used to be-it's what the client does with the characters that matters. Length is still important; yet rather than only a mix of words or expressions, it should be a blend of characters, numbers and punctuation marks. Ars Technica elaborates the issue: Yiannis Chrysanthou cracked 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn1', a mysterious expression from a HP Lovecraft story. But since the expression was contained in this Wikipedia article, it ended up in a word list that enabled Chrysanthou to split the expression in a matter of minutes, says Ars.
Users should consider the use of a password manager, for example, Keepass, to create strong passwords that won't be found in dictionaries. What's more, obviously, they ought to use a unique password for each different online account, that way even if it is stolen by a hacker and cracked by hashcat, it will at any rate be only one account that is bargained.
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