Hashcat is a powerful and versatile tool for cracking hashes using different techniques such as dictionary attacks, brute force attacks, mask attacks, and hybrid attacks. It supports multiple hash types such as MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, NTLM, and others. It uses the processing power of CPUs or GPUs to speed up the cracking process. The potential disadvantages of this tool are that it is used to crack and retrieve passwords, which may allow attackers to access sensitive data. It can also be exploited in attacks on leaked databases or insecurely stored authentication files, and may lead to a breach of users’ privacy if the passwords are not strong and well encrypted. To protect against these risks, it is recommended to use strong encryption algorithms with the Salt application to make the cracking process more difficult. It is also preferable to activate strong, long, and random password policies with 2FA and reduce the storage of passwords as much as possible. Authentication processes should be monitored and system logs should be analyzed to detect any unauthorized attempts to decrypt.

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