How to recover lost passwords from ZIP, RAR, 7z, PDF and Office files using hashcat and John the Ripper — methods, commands and worked examples.
The airodump-ng + cap2hccapx workflow is dead; hcxdumptool + hashcat mode 22000 is the current standard. This walkthrough captures a PMKID and full 4-way handshake, converts to the unified hc22000 format, and runs dictionary, rule-based, and mask attacks against it — with real hashcat 7.1.2 syntax and 2026-era GPU speeds. Closes with why none of this touches a properly configured WPA3-SAE network.
rockyou.txt was born from a 2009 breach where 32 million passwords were stored in plaintext. It became the default pentest wordlist for a decade — but weakpass.com's 2026 rankings show it's no longer top-tier. Smaller, curated cuts (rockyou-65.txt) and continuously-refreshed 'found in the wild' lists from hashmob.net now outrank the original and its billion-entry sequels rockyou2021.txt and rockyou2024.txt.
fcrackzip is a small, old, command-line tool that recovers passwords on classic-ZipCrypto-encrypted .zip files. Brute-force or dictionary, runs everywhere, still useful in 2026 — with hashcat/john as the modern follow-up when it isn't fast enough.
pdfcrack is a small, single-threaded CPU tool for recovering lost PDF user and owner passwords. Fine for 40-bit RC4 and small dictionary attacks; for 128/256-bit AES PDFs, migrate to pdf2john + hashcat on a GPU.
rarcrack is long abandoned. The 2026 way to recover a RAR/7z/ZIP password is to extract a hash with John the Ripper's rar2john/7z2john/zip2john, then run it through hashcat (GPU) or john. Dictionary first, then masks. Covers the right hashcat mode for each format.