The Toolkit

Password Attacks

Passwords are still how most things are protected, and password attacks split into two worlds. Offline cracking takes a stolen hash and throws enormous numbers of guesses at it on your own hardware, where speed is everything — that’s John the Ripper and hashcat. Online attacks guess credentials against a live service, where you’re limited by the network and by lockouts — that’s Hydra. Both are only as good as the guesses you feed them, which is why the category also ships the classic wordlists.

Tool Source What it’s for
john official John the Ripper — flexible offline hash cracker with huge format support.
hydra official Fast online login brute-forcer across dozens of protocols.
hashcat official GPU-accelerated offline cracker — the fastest way to break hashes.
Wordlists official rockyou, SecLists, and the packaged wordlists collection.

All live under Security → Password Attacks. John and hashcat are shown as a single entry each rather than listing their scores of *2john/*2hashcat helper converters — those are documented on their pages.