The below article explains how I used password fingerprinting to crack 500,000 password hashes in less than half a day completly automated. This article shows each command step by step, but only to describe the details of how password fingerprinting with oclHashcat works. The reality is that the password fingerprinting process can easily be automated by a script which is why we call it automated password cracking.
The Fingerprint Attack in my example had a success rate of about 80% in a 100% automated process after 12 hours with a single GeForce GTX 285. In order to reach the 500,000 cracked hashes I first created a list of 650,000 unique password hashes using a well known leaked password hash database. Once I had the list of 650,000 unique password hashes I started out by doing some easy attacks on the hashes such as a five character long brute force using all possible character sets which will provide an initial wordlist to start the fingerprint attack with. You really do not need to perform this step as explained further below. Once the initial brute force attack is complete the real fingerprinting starts. You will take the initial results, pipe them into the expander, and then run a combined dictionary attack against the hash list. Once we have results from the second set of attacks we use the expander again and issue another attack. You will see through the process, which is described in detail below, that results are returned at a very high rate by automated finding patterns and exploiting those patterns to return results.
