Hashcat is best described as which tool?

• A. Web vulnerability scanning
• B. GPU-accelerated password cracking
• C. Privilege escalation
• D. Network traffic capture

Answer: (B)

Hashcat is built to perform password cracking by testing large numbers of candidate passwords against hashed values, leveraging the parallel processing power of GPUs to accelerate the process. This makes it ideal for password auditing, recovery, and cracking tasks, especially with modern, hard-to-crack hashes where CPU brute force would be impractically slow. It supports many hashing algorithms and attack modes, including brute-force, dictionary, rule-based, and mask attacks, making GPU-accelerated password cracking its defining capability.

Web vulnerability scanning, privilege escalation, and network traffic capture describe different security activities—scanning for web defects, gaining higher privileges, and capturing/analysis of network packets, respectively. They do not capture what Hashcat is designed to do.