Blog

Why an NTLM hash is password-equivalent, how pass-the-hash works with Impacket, NetExec and Mimikatz, and the controls that actually stop lateral movement.

Salts kill rainbow tables and shared-hash leaks. They do not slow a single targeted crack. Why salted MD5 is still weak, and why you need a slow KDF too.

What the $6$ in /etc/shadow means, how sha512crypt rounds and salts work, why it is slower than raw SHA-512 but weaker than bcrypt, and how to crack it.

Benchmarks lie if you read them wrong. Workload profiles, optimized kernels, thermal throttling, multi-GPU and segmenting big attacks, with honest cloud rental math.

MD5 and SHA-1 fall to a GPU in seconds because they are fast and often unsalted. Learn why slow KDFs like bcrypt and Argon2 resist — and what defenders should do.

rockyou.txt is a starting line, not a strategy. How to combine curated wordlists, rules, masks and targeted lists, and when each one is a waste of GPU time.