Password Attacks and Credential Exploitation Cheat Sheet

Password attacks and credential exploitation are the techniques penetration testers and attackers use to turn a username, a captured hash, or a stolen ticket into a working login, spanning offline hash cracking, online guessing, credential capture on the wire, and the reuse of Windows authentication material without ever knowing a plaintext password. This area matters because most real-world breaches still start with weak, reused, or stolen credentials rather than exotic exploits, and because a single foothold account can cascade into domain-wide access through hash and ticket reuse. The key mental model is that authentication material comes in layers, plaintext passwords, wordlists, cracked or captured hashes, and Kerberos tickets, and an attacker only needs to compromise the weakest layer defenders left unprotected; every technique below is best read as "which layer does this attack, and does defeating it require the plaintext at all."