After briefly touching on the general concept of password cracking, the focus of the talk will be on the effectiveness of different attack modes in hashcat, with a heavy emphasis on rule-based attacks. While the name of the talk is “hashcat,” this talk will almost exclusively discuss the GPU-enabled versions (Specifically cudahashcat). The final phase of the talk will include the results of my own experiments in creating rule sets for password cracking, along with an analysis of the known plaintext passwords from the test hash list.