Lion Cipher Lab
Turn a password-cracking audit into a better password policy (Hashcat results analysis)
- SOC Analyst / Blue Team
- Intermediate
- ~30 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Anyone can run a password cracker; far fewer people can read what it produced and change something because of it. A crack audit is one of the most honest tests a security team can run — it measures, on real hardware, how guessable your workforce's actual passwords are, instead of assuming a policy on paper is working. But the raw output is a wall of recovered credentials, and its value is entirely in the interpretation: which patterns dominate, what those patterns say about where the current policy fails, and which fixes will actually move the number next quarter. That last mile — findings to…
What you'll learn
- reading a password-crack audit's summary stats (crack rate, speed, hash mode) and what they reveal about the hash algorithm AND the passwords
- spotting structural patterns in cracked passwords: season+year, company+number+symbol, keyboard walks, reused base words, minimum-length clustering
- explaining why a password that 'meets complexity requirements' still cracks in minutes
- translating audit findings into concrete policy fixes grounded in NIST SP 800-63B
- prioritizing remediation by account privilege (cracked admins = fix now)
- judgment: when a crack audit is the right measure of password health, and its limits (guessability vs exposure; MFA as the real backstop)
- defensive audit discipline: authorized, own-org hashes, purpose is policy — never attacking a person
Steps in this lab
- The scenario: an authorized audit is done — your job is to read it
- Read the crack-rate stats first — they describe TWO things at once
- Spot the patterns — this is where the policy failure becomes visible
- Why 'it meets the complexity requirements' still cracked instantly
- Translate the findings into concrete policy fixes
- Prioritize: a cracked privileged account is a fire, not a finding
- The judgment: when a crack audit is the right measure — and when it isn't