Command Line Tools

Hashcat is the world's fastest password recovery tool and the de facto standard for password security auditing. It's an open-source, GPU-accelerated cracker that supports over 350 hash algorithms across five attack modes. During authorized pentests, it's used to audit password strength — you extract hashes from a target system (SAM dump, /etc/shadow, database dump) and crack them offline to demonstrate weak credential policies.

Hydra is a parallelized network login cracker that supports many protocols (SSH, FTP, HTTP/S, SMB, RDP, MySQL, SMTP, etc.). This is a(n) article / guide on Hydra.

John the Ripper is one of the most well-known and widely used password cracking tools in the security world. It's open-source and primarily designed for offline password cracking—taking password hashes and attempting to recover the plaintext passwords through various attack modes. This is a guide on John the Ripper (Password Cracking Tool).

Here's a guide on how to get managed into monitor mode across different network cards and operating systems.

There are several layers to terminal customization — the terminal emulator itself, the shell, and the prompt. Here's a breakdown of the main areas you can tweak. Here's an article on customizing terminal!