Password Cracking Challenge 3 - Cracking 3

Prompt

Cyber Command: Our analysts have obtained password dumps of default passwords. We know the password scheme is an adjective plus a noun plus two digits. See if you can crack them.

Answers

09bb2a559af215d490d3ce5f70ce2226
cruelcompany10

6e7a4ea0bd0d12b9b851010b91116802
sharpbook16

dd342239b6aee4ad8fccbb09797ce109
charmingmoney27

Steps I Took

Knew the format was [adjective][noun][2 digits], so I needed a combined wordlist.

Found an adjective list and a noun list on GitHub, then used this Python script to combine them:

with open("adjectives.txt") as a, open("nouns.txt") as n, open("bases.txt", "w") as out:
    adjs = [x.strip() for x in a if x.strip()]
    nouns = [x.strip() for x in n if x.strip()]
    for adj in adjs:
        for noun in nouns:
            out.write(adj + noun + "\n")

Ran a hashcat hybrid attack to append 2 digits to each base word:

hashcat -m 0 -a 6 hashes.txt bases.txt ?d?d

First attempts with small lists (300 words each, ~9M combinations) failed. Kept increasing wordlist size. Eventually tried using Claude.ai directly with the hashes:

Then submitted a longer prompt with more context:

Eventually succeeded after using these full wordlists:

• Adjectives
• Nouns

This was the second hardest challenge overall.