Masks
Before we go further, it is important to understand what masks are in password cracking. Regular brute force attacks are outdated, masks bring a level of intelligence to our brute force attempts. In essence, a mask is just a symbolic list of characters you want to use in any type of brute force attack.
You can use:
- ?l – lowercase
- ?u – uppercase
- ?s – symbol
- ?d – numbers
- ?h – 0-9, and letters “a-f”
- ?H – numbers 0-9, and letters “A-F”
- ?a – Any number, letter, or symbol
- ?b – Binary – Every hex character from 00 to ff
