If anyone would like to try their own hand at discovering Bill Joy's 1970s-era password, here's how to get started with the hashcat tool. First check if everything is working by trying a known result, e.g., Dennis Ritchie's password which we know was "dmac":
If see you a message that says, "gfVwhuAMF0Trw:dmac" and "Status: Cracked", it's working. Now put in Bill Joy's hash ".2xvLVqGHJm8M" in place of "gfVwhuAMF0Trw" and a list of guesses, one per line, in the guesses file, and run hashcat again.
We've been told that the password is a chess-related word, all lowercase letters except that one letter is a matching control character, such as in "b^Ishop" where the "i" is actually a control-I.
We've been told that the password is a chess-related word, all lowercase letters except that one letter is a matching control character, such as in "b^Ishop" where the "i" is actually a control-I.