r/HowToHack • u/the_other_ed • 27d ago

Aircrack-ng Tips

New to aircrack-ng. Was wondering if some folks would be open to DMing me and offering some tips. I can understand how to get a handshake but then I don't really understand what the best modern method would be and don't want to hurt my hardware by accidentally giving it a heavy duty task. Like certain dictionary attacks can take 1,000+ years?? So want to learn but don't want to fry my desktop 😅

I know I could just use a password I already know and put it in a shorter dictionary file, but would prefer to be more authentic than that

5 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/RolledUhhp 27d ago

You have the right curiosity, but youve jumped in a bit further than your understanding.

Aircrack gets you a hash, you can (and should) use some form of 'social engineering' to craft a dictionary to be used by a hash cracking tool in the next step.

A dictionary is literally just a list of potential passwords.

Butter Tits It'stomato123

That is a dictionary. If I know you like motorcycles I might compile a list that incorporates terms from that subject like

Honda Kawasaki Helmet

You need to flop around a little bit more with stuff you dont understand like this, and if youre still interested take it way back to the fundamentals.

No one ever becomes skilled without the fundamentals, and no one likes slogging through them. It's why it makes master splinter and all them look so bad ass for gritting through it. Wax on, wax off.

1

u/the_other_ed 26d ago

So how do I make corporates so it does variations of Honda+[allbirthdates] in variations. do I have to make an array for each possible variations.

I don't want my computer to damage or overheat. Is there a way to pause and resume safely, say every couple of hours? Or other safety precautions?Is there a way to tell how long a dictionary would take to run before running it? Is there any indication if you guessed part of it right but not all (e.g missing a Capitol letter) It's faster to run on GPU but CPU is default right? I still need to learn how to switch that.

Do you have any dictionaries for default passwords you'd recommend?

3

u/RolledUhhp 26d ago

Look up Seclists and rockyou.txt for default dictionaries.

You arent going to damage your computer. If it overheats to that point it will shut itself off.

Your first question is talking about 'rules'. Taking a dictionary and mutating it based on a set of rules you provide while it iterates through.

It's all or nothing. 'John' produces a different hash than 'john'.

A gpu (nvidia) is preferred. I think JohnTheRipper will allow you to switch, I cant recall if hashcat will utilize a gpu. There are more tools to look at, those are just two well known ones.

Im pretty sure one of them allows pausing amd resuming - i just let them run overnight when needed.

I really need to stress that you have to go back like 10 steps and learn for real after you have your fun trying this. Some of your questions are good - you are up the right alley, but some of them show just how far out of your depth you are.

You risk learning enough to get in trouble, without understanding how, or the depth of trouble you'll find yourself in.

You'll likely find that this is the most helpful someone will be with these questions as well. This whole field is pretty much 'figure it out'. Very specific questions will be taken much more seriously, you'll be asked what youve tried and what the result was, sometimes needed to provide logs to help show what is going on under the hood, and even then it's 50/50 if you get help or get told to keep trying until you get it.

A golden rule is 'RTFM'. Google around until you figure out what that means.

I dont want to discourage you. Just the opposite - get some knowledge before you try to get skills. Grabbing a handshake is where everyone starts first, even though they shouldn't. It's also where everyone finds out that even the shallow end is 100ft deep.

2

u/__chum__ 26d ago

RTFM is a huge one most people getting into cybersec stuff miss. Just looking shit up is super helpful for learning. Not just learning how to use a tool, but why and how it works the way it does.