// Crack the Vault

Two recovered password hashes, one small wordlist — recover the weaker of the two passwords.

Stay in scope. Every artifact here is synthetic — built for this challenge, not captured from a real system. Apply the same techniques only against systems you own or are explicitly authorized to test.

// Download

Credential Dump Two username:hash pairs, MD5, unsalted Candidate Wordlist 32 candidate passwords — both real ones are in here

// Your Toolbox

hashcat `hashcat -m 0 -a 0 hashes.txt wordlist.txt` — mode 0 is raw MD5.
John the Ripper `john --format=raw-md5 --wordlist=wordlist.txt hashes.txt` works just as well.
A one-line Python loop For a wordlist this small, hashing every candidate yourself and comparing is completely reasonable — that's the whole lesson.

// Situation

A small credential dump was recovered — two accounts, both MD5, no salt. That alone should bother you (MD5 is fast to brute-force and salting is what prevents this exact attack), but tonight you're on offense: recover the weaker of the two passwords using the provided wordlist.

// The Challenge

01 easy

Recover the Weaker Password

One of these two hashes will fall to the wordlist almost instantly. Find it and submit the plaintext password (not the hash, not the username).

Target file: hashes.txt + wordlist.txt