ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Hashcat

Okay kiddo, let me explain to you what hashcat is. Hashcat is like a very smart detective who helps people figure out secret codes that they forgot.

You know when you have a password to your iPad or mommy's phone, right? That password is like a secret code that keeps your information safe. Sometimes people forget their passwords and can't get into their own devices. That's where hashcat comes in.

Hashcat is like a super-fast computer program that can figure out the secret code (or password, as adults call it) that someone forgot. It does this by making a lot of guesses really quickly until it gets the right one. This process is called "cracking" the code or password.

But how does hashcat guess the password, you may ask? Well, it starts by turning the password into a jumbled-up mess, called a hash. This hash looks like a bunch of random letters and numbers. Then hashcat tries a whole bunch of different possible passwords and turns them into hashes too, to see if they match the original hash. If it finds a match, it means it found the password!

Hashcat is really good at this because it can try millions of possibilities every second. But it's also really hard because people can use complex passwords that are hard to guess, or they can even use multiple passwords to make it even more secure.

So, hashcat is a powerful tool that helps people recover their forgotten passwords by guessing a lot of possibilities really fast until it finds the right one, just like a smart detective!