Hashcat 7.0.0: The King of Password Crackers Returns with Massive Upgrades
The Hashcat development team has unveiled a major update to its renowned password-cracking tool—version 7.0.0. This marks the first major release in over two years, encompassing hundreds of bug fixes, dozens of new features, and a comprehensive refactoring of core components. In scope and ambition, it far surpasses all interim updates of the 6.2.x branch.
Over the course of its development, more than 900,000 lines of code were modified, with contributions from 105 developers—74 of them newcomers to the project. All previously undocumented features from the 6.2.x series have been consolidated and thoroughly documented.
Among the most significant innovations is the Assimilation Bridge system, which enables the integration of external resources into the cracking process, including CPUs, FPGAs, and embedded interpreters. A new Python Bridge Plugin allows developers to rapidly write custom hash-matching logic without recompilation, offering multithreading support and a built-in rule engine. GPU virtualization has also been introduced, permitting a single physical GPU to be divided into multiple logical devices, thus simplifying asynchronous workloads. Moreover, Hashcat can now automatically detect hash types without the explicit -m parameter.
Support for algorithms has been dramatically expanded: 58 new application-specific formats have been added, including Argon2, MetaMask, Microsoft Online Account, SNMPv3, GPG, OpenSSH, and LUKS2. In addition, 17 new constructs relevant to web services and protocols, 11 new cryptographic primitives, and 20 utilities for extracting hashes from diverse sources—ranging from BitLocker and APFS to VirtualBox VMs and cryptocurrency wallets—are now included.
Performance optimization was another focal point. The autotuning mechanism has been completely redesigned, improving device utilization. Memory management has been rewritten to remove the 4GB limitation, ensuring full compatibility with modern GPU resources. Popular attack modes such as NTLM, NetNTLMv2, and RAR3 received targeted optimizations. In some cases, performance gains are substantial—for example, scrypt saw up to a 320% speed increase, while NetNTLMv2 on Intel CPUs achieved more than a threefold improvement.
Hashcat 7.0.0 also introduces support for new backends. AMD GPUs now leverage HIP, prioritized over OpenCL, while macOS gains native support through Metal, bringing compatibility with Apple Silicon chips and significant performance improvements.
For developers, diagnostic and debugging tools have been enhanced, test coverage expanded, and the rule engine optimized. Additional character sets have been introduced, new output formats—including JSON—are supported, dictionary handling has been refined, and numerous bugs have been resolved.
This release stands as a testament to the collaborative efforts of the community, dozens of contributors, and dedicated testers. The team acknowledges that the process took longer than anticipated, but they emphasize that the result was worth the wait. Hashcat 7.0.0 is now available for download via the official website and GitHub, with full release notes spanning nearly 10,000 words.
