Home > Products > Windows Passwords > Windows Password Recovery > Screenshots > Attacking hashes > Preliminary attack
Recovering Windows hashes - preliminary attack
17.04.2024
Reset Windows Password v14.2
Telegram data recovery, Photo Database and Media Player investigation tools, and some more
12.04.2024
Office password recovery tools
Resetting VBA passwords
01.03.2024
New blog post
Dumping the history of users' IP addresses in Windows
20.02.2024
Reset Windows Password v14.1
IP addresses history viewer, fast disk search, local security editor and some more

Articles and video

You may find it helpful to read our articles on Windows security and password recovery examples. Video section contains a number of movies about our programs in action

Windows Password Recovery - preliminary attack



Preliminary attack

Preliminary attack (developed in Passcape Software) is quite effective against short, simple, dictionary, repetitive, keyboard, etc. passwords and consists of several mini-attacks. Each mini-attack can be enabled/disabled individually.

Preliminary attack runs about 5-10 minutes or even faster. It consists of at least the following sub-attacks:

  • Common brute-force attack. Performs several simple brute-force attacks based on predefined character sets. 
  • Simple dictionary attack. Fast check the password by verifying all words from a given dictionary.
  • Extended dictionary attack. It's almost the same as above but with some smart mutation options set on.
  • Attack on repeatable symbols. Checking passwords as a repeatable sequence of a character. Eg. '1111111' or 'xxxxxxx'.
  • Attack on simple patterns, like '123456' or 'qwerty'.
  • Attack on complex patterns. The same as above, for compound patterns.
  • Keyboard attack checks for keyboard passwords and all possible combinations. Eg. 'qwer', 'qazwsx', 'asdzxc', etc.
  • National keyboard attack. The same as above, but checks passwords typed in national keyboard layout.
  • Complex keyboard attack is the same as the previous 2 attacks, for compound keyboard patterns.
  • Passcape Password Prediction attack is the most complicated and state-of-art password prediction tool.
  • Attack on name-based passwords.
  • Attack on hex passwords (eg. 7A49F3).
  • Attack passwords based on numeric words.
  • Search for short passwords that were created using non-standard UNICODE characters.