Cracking Passwords with Umlauts

Demonstrates cracking a Windows NTLM password that contains German umlauts and explains why encoding matters: John the Ripper succeeds with the UTF-8 wordlist, while Hashcat requires the wordlist encoded as Windows-1252 (ANSI) or use of --hex-charset. The post provides concrete commands (iconv, hashcat, john), byte-level examples, and guidance for defining custom character sets for dictionary and brute-force attacks.