This is an update on this previous post on foreign NT hashes where I got things a little wrong by believing the source encoding matters for an NT hash. It doesn’t really, let me show you why. I spent a bit of time exploring further, in particular, I took it down to a test case. Jameel gave me his name as a password in Arabic: Included as a picture because…
If you’ve ever cracked a hash with hashcat, you’ll know that sometimes it will give you a $HEX[0011223344] style clear. This is done to preserve the raw byte value of the clear when the encoding isn’t known (or there’s a colon “:” character). Driven by an inability to crack the majority of a certain set of hashes I suspected were in a foreign charset, I decided to have a closer…