7MS #474: Password Cracking in the Cloud - Part 3 7 Minute Security

Hey friends! Today we're dusting off an old mini-series about password cracking in the cloud (check out part 1 and part 2) and sharing some awesome info on building a monster of a cracking rig in AWS!
One reason we haven't talked about password cracking in the cloud in a while is because back in winter of 2019 I built baby's first password cracking. Unfortunately, this week, Hashy (the name I gave to the rig) is overheating, and GPUs are impossible to find, so what's a pentester to do?
Well, in today's episode I talk about this article from Sevnx which walks you through building a virtual password-cracking beast in the cloud. The article (complemented by a sweet video) will get you running in short order.
WARNING: running this instance is super expensive (the author warns the instance would cost ~$9k/month if you left it run continuously).
The steps are pretty straightforward, but between reboots I found that hashcat acted all wonky. Luckily, the article addresses that with this great tip:
Pro tip: Save the Cuda download somewhere. If you ever turn your cracker off and get errors running hashcat when you turn it back on, re-run the install line. We think AWS sometimes refreshes the drivers or something and hashcat doesn't like it very much.
If you need help installing one of my fave tools, hatecrack check out my password cracking in the cloud gist. Also, our buddy Joe pointed me towards a utility called duplicut to help de-dupe large password-cracking wordlists.
Once the AWS instance is setup, what kind of stats do we get out of this demon? Here's the result of hashcat -b:
Hashmode: 0 - MD5 Speed.#1.........: 55936.1 MH/s (47.79ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:8 Speed.#2.........: 55771.4 MH/s (47.94ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:8 Speed.#3.........: 55827.0 MH/s (47.88ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:8 Speed.#4.........: 55957.7 MH/s (47.78ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:8 Speed.#*.........: 223.5 GH/s Hashmode: 100 - SHA1 Speed.#1.........: 17830.1 MH/s (75.08ms) @ Accel:16 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#2.........: 17774.0 MH/s (75.21ms) @ Accel:16 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#3.........: 17780.9 MH/s (75.26ms) @ Accel:16 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#4.........: 17795.6 MH/s (75.22ms) @ Accel:16 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#*.........: 71180.6 MH/s Hashmode: 1400 - SHA2-256 Speed.#1.........: 7709.9 MH/s (86.84ms) @ Accel:8 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#2.........: 7718.3 MH/s (86.75ms) @ Accel:8 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#3.........: 7710.4 MH/s (86.75ms) @ Accel:8 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#4.........: 7694.4 MH/s (87.02ms) @ Accel:8 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#*.........: 30833.0 MH/s Hashmode: 1700 - SHA2-512 Speed.#1.........: 2399.8 MH/s (69.70ms) @ Accel:8 Loops:256 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#2.........: 2401.1 MH/s (69.68ms) @ Accel:8 Loops:256 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#3.........: 2397.3 MH/s (69.78ms) @ Accel:8 Loops:256 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#4.........: 2400.3 MH/s (69.70ms) @ Accel:8 Loops:256 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#*.........: 9598.5 MH/s Hashmode: 22000 - WPA-PBKDF2-PMKID+EAPOL (Iterations: 4095) Speed.#1.........: 866.5 kH/s (94.23ms) @ Accel:16 Loops:256 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#2.........: 866.7 kH/s (94.21ms) @ Accel:16 Loops:256 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#3.........: 865.6 kH/s (94.30ms) @ Accel:16 Loops:256 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#4.........: 866.7 kH/s (94.20ms) @ Accel:16 Loops:256 Thr:1024 Vec:1 Speed.#*.........: 3465.5 kH/s Hashmode: 1000 - NTLM Speed.#1.........: 102.2 GH/s (26.05ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:8 Speed.#2.........: 102.3 GH/s (26.05ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:8 Speed.#3.........: 102.2 GH/s (26.07ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:8 Speed.#4.........: 102.3 GH/s (26.04ms) @ Accel:32 Loops:1024 Thr:1024 Vec:8 Speed.#*.........: 409.0 GH/s Hashmode: 3000 - LM Speed.#1.........: 41104.7 MH/s (64.74ms) @ Accel:512 Loops:1024 Thr:64 Vec:1 Speed.#2.....