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Password Attacks
OSCP · Chapter 12

Password Attacks

Password attacks exploit weak, reused, or poorly hashed credentials rather than a software bug. They remain one of the highest-yield techniques because humans are predictable and organizations under-invest in authentication hardening.

Key concepts

  • Online brute force (guessing against a live login) is slow and noisy; offline cracking (against a stolen hash dump) is fast and silent once you have the hashes.
  • Password spraying (few common passwords across many accounts) evades per-account lockout policies that block classic brute force.
  • Hash type matters enormously for cracking speed — unsalted MD5 cracks in seconds, properly salted bcrypt/argon2 can be effectively uncrackable at scale.
  • The best defenses are MFA and long passphrases (length beats complexity rules) plus blocking known-breached passwords via blocklists.

Example

hashcat -m 0 -a 0 hashes.txt rockyou.txt   # dictionary attack against unsalted MD5 hashes

Try it yourself

Using a lab-safe hash sample and a small wordlist, run hashcat or John the Ripper locally and observe how much faster an unsalted MD5 hash cracks compared to a bcrypt hash of the same password.

ReferenceSearch video walkthroughs

@ Daniel Burlacu