news.ycombinator.com• May 21, 2026• 1 min read
Show HN: I Dedicated 4 Years to Mastering Offline Password CrackingHi everyone,I am Bojta Lepenye, and first of all, I want to thank the core developers of Hashcat. In my experience, it is quite literally the most capable tool available for offline password cracking across a wide range of use cases.I have spent the last 4 years (from age 14 to 18) extensively working with Hashcat and the tools surrounding it, and I have documented what I have learned throughout that time (since January 18, 2022) in my first book. During that period, I also had to continuously update and rewrite major sections as the field evolved. One example was the introduction of GPU support for Argon2 and other memory-hard password hashing algorithms, which significantly changed some cracking workflows.My passion for this book, or its “quick starter,” if you will, came from an ethically conducted penetration test I performed with full authorization at my school. This is something I am both hesitant and quite proud to acknowledge.At the beginning, I simply wrote down everything I h
IMAGE
