Hashcat is a popular and effective password cracker widely used by both penetration testers and criminals and spies. The best way to prevent an attacker from using hashcat against you is to test your own defenses first. There are numerous attacks short of a full brute-force attempt, including dictionary attacks, combinator attacks, mask attacks, and rule-based attacks. Hashcat can also harness the power of your GPU to brute force if you have the computing rig for it — and time to spare.”]