hashcat Forum

playing around with the markov feature in Lite and noticed that it's faster if markov is disabled when trying to crack the example hash of "hashcat!"

markov-disable takes 15 secs to crack.
markov with default hcstat or rockyou.hcstat takes about 3mins.

is this normal?

command is:
oclhashcat-lite64.exe --pw-min 8 md5hash -2 ?l?s ?l?l?l?l?l?l?l?2

yes, because the ! is the 2nd automatic selected char at 0x21

assuming i did not already know the plaintext. when using markov should the mask always be the same, as in, ?2?2?2?2?2?2?2?2 instead of how i had it?

tying to understand when is a good use-case to enable or disable markov

no, markov fully supports masks