In the password-cracking tool output, what does c/s stand for?

• A. Current guess
• B. Time spent
• C. Password combinations per second
• D. Number of guesses per hour

Answer: (C)

c/s is a throughput measurement for password cracking. It represents how many candidate password combinations the tool tests each second. This tells you the speed of the crack, not how long it’s spent on a single guess, not how many guesses you’ve made per hour. A higher c/s means the tool is testing more possibilities per second, speeding up the overall process. For example, 5,000 c/s means about 5,000 guesses every second (roughly 18 million per hour), though real-world factors like hash type, salting, iteration counts, and hardware affect the actual speed. This is why the best description is that c/s indicates password combinations tested per second.