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- Hacker News
- I just bought the book and look forward to reading it. I also started in cyber at 14.
These are the kinds of real-world constraints where you actually learn how tools like Hashcat work under pressure.
You are going to do big things in the industry!
by chadbennett - This is a really impressive project, especially starting at 14. The point about there being no single comprehensive resource rings true, I've tried to learn about password security before and always ended up jumping between five different tabs just to understand one concept.by aqsa_sajjad
- There are actually a few recent books on the topic (no clue about their quality but reviews look positive):
Netmux (2019): Hash Crack: Password Cracking Manual¹
James Leyte-Vidal (2024): Ethical Password Cracking: decode passwords using John the Ripper, hashcat, and advanced methods for password breaking²
Daniel W. Dieterle (2024): Password Cracking with Kali Linux³
¹) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1793458618
²) https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Password-Cracking-passwords-a...
³) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/password-cracking-with/...
by raphman - Nice to see someone going the same path as me!
Haven't read the book or used Hashcat, I have a question. Is there anything yet to generate rainbow tables out of password regex?
- Nice job! It is a massive achievement to publish a book let alone to be start a career so early at age! Now need to find time read the book. It seems it be quite interesting.by ViAchKoN
- Congratulate on finishing such a big project on a complicated topic, and putting in all this effort so that others can learn as well. I enjoyed reading the first few pages on Amazonby sijmen
- Congratulations! The book looks great.
I would love to hear more about the process of writing and preparing it for publishing. It's self-published? How did you do the typesetting and the diagrams?
by andai - Thank you so much. Yes, the book is self-published. For the typesetting, I used https://reedsy.com/ . I made all of the diagrams in PowerPoint myself, and just inserted them as high-quality images.
- I too would be interested in hearing about the writing and formatting process. I described my own process as a software engineer and first-time novelist here: https://frequal.com/forwriters/by TeaVMFan
- Great job. The book is 427 pages.
Why not put the video on YouTube?
by gabrielsroka - Are you drunk? He’s lucky Google and Amazon haven’t noticed yet. If he wants to keep access to his accounts he should pull them down immediately and distribute via torrent.by bradgranath
- Hi Bojta, I just bought your book via Amazon from Germany. Nowadays I only read on my e-reader but wish to support your achievement and bought a hard copy. I'm excited to read and learn; in recent times I'm scared of LLM writing and books fully created by those things. So I hope I'll like this and learn a lot. I love that you created the graphs in PowerPoint. Here's to your success. Do you have a newsletter or website for blog articles and other books in the future?by valina-line
- It’s always exciting to me when someone who has been so obviously passionate and obsessed with a technical discipline decides to take the time to write down what they have learned to help others. This is literally the foundation of civilization and what makes me happy to be a post-agricultural human. So, thank you.
I have followed a similar path in other technical subjects, and have authored a couple of books on those journeys. I look forward to reading yours.
Some people have brought up style and structure issues with your book.. try to take this in stride. Writing for publication is its own whole thing, and involves a lot more than just putting ideas to print. Creating text that conveys the spirit, personality, and information that you want it to is nontrivial, and it takes time and practice to master. It’s easy, as a reader, to feel the rough spots in a literary work… but that does not mean that the reader would do any better when confronted with writing a book level tome, so hear the critique but don’t overthink the critic.
Even though writing well was a side quest to my otherwise very technical focus, I found a joy in developing my literary voice… and I would encourage you to keep uncovering yours.
Don’t be bullied into writing “correctly”. If you want to ponder the senselessness of life you can read one of millions of “correctly” written papers that will have you wanting to end it all just so you don’t have to go on. In these informative but wasted pages you won’t find a shred of the author, and only find yourself bored by the subject that so enthralled them to spend a thousand hours or more writing about it. What a wasted opportunity. They became so focused on writing correctly that they lost their voice entirely. Their writing may inform, but it will rarely inspire.
In these little bits of your writing I have skimmed so far, there’s plenty of warts but I feel you in the work. Your passion is contagious, and I am encouraged to learn. Sure, work out the warts, but don’t be bullied into writing “correctly” by sticking to formality and convention.
Writing is about informing, inspiring, and guiding the frame of mind of the reader. Your work does that because your voice shines through. Sure, it could be easier to read, sometimes clearer, and you should work on that if you want to, but don’t sacrifice your voice in the process. The best written work has a definite personal opinion on how to write a voice, and it’s usually not the “correct” way.
Humans writing like humans is what makes writing worthwhile in the third industrial age. Frolic in your humanity and keep up the good work. Don’t let the well intentioned bastards keep you down, especially if they have a point.
by K0balt - I have to admit, seeing some of the critiques about my grammar and style had me second-guessing myself a bit today, so reading your perspective honestly means a lot to me, especially coming from someone who has navigated publishing technical books themselves.
I definitely have plenty of room to grow and smooth out those "warts" as I continue writing, but I will take your advice to heart and make sure I don't lose my voice in the process. Thank you again for the incredible encouragement!
I still can't process the number of comments this post has. This is waaay more than I expected.
- I've got an old datacenter KVM with a root password I've been unable to crack, even though it's an ancient DES one.
Does anyone have a good cloud-hosted password cracker? I can't seem to brute force it, no matter how long I let John the ripper run.
by mmastrac - Rent a gpu from vast.ai or similar an let hashcat have funby wingtw
- An EC2 instance with lots of cores like a c6i.32xlarge should do the trick, no? You could even pay for spot instances and just checkpoint frequently and copy the progress file to S3 when you get the interruption warning.by arcfour
- This is an amazing achievement for someone of any age, but to publish a book with this much research at 18 is phenomenal. I heartily congratulate you.
I've hopped through the book and it seems carefully laid out and organized. I may come back at you with questions once I've read further. Cheers.
by eigenrick - I'll add my congratulations too.
I work in info sec - I've always been interested in password cracking and hashcat specifically, but have never had the time to devote to really dig into it. I'll check it out.
Well done!
- Thanks for sharing. This looks interesting. Impressive achievement.
This book is currently not really relevant for me, so I just skimmed the samples on Amazon. I found the technical content to be reasonably accurate and interesting although sometimes a little bit verbose (e.g., the section about 'what is a password') or slightly imprecise. In general, I think this book might have benefited from a thorough copyediting pass. There are quite a few grammar errors and unpolished sentences in the book, e.g.:
> The reason why Linux is imperative is that well, for one, most of the tools we will use, while indeed have builds for other systems, like Windows, in this book we will work with Linux.
Wishing you success and keep on writing!
by raphman - What did you find slightly imprecise?by dugidugout
- In this day, I actually appreciate imperfect human written content.
Too much AI slop, perfect grammar but no substance out there.
This seems like a substance filled book.
Congrats on shipping a book.
by nojvek - Yea after skimming the samples on Amazon I noticed that nearly every single sentence had at least one comma in it (adding zero value). It feels like I'm reading someones thoughts.
Personally, I love abusing commas for comments and shitposting, but they should be avoided in informative resources like books, otherwise, it looks like a word salad. Say your thoughts and ideas with boldness and certainty.
But hey you write better than I did at 18, so I ain't judging. Just trying to provide helpful feedback for you (the op) to improve on.
by copypaper