Zues7v2 - Cloud-Based Hash Cracker

Created: 05/12/2023

By Max Ahartz

Prepared for:

Curious Minds Everywhere

*** Disclaimer ***

This guide is for educational purposes only.  I do not condone or promote malicious behavior of any kind. You should be working with self-generated hashes for your own research purposes only or, if on an engagement, have legal authority and permission to do so.

Executive Summary

This project started as a fun automation project, combining learning how to automate in a zero-trust cloud environment with a topic of interest like "hash cracking". Once you setup an AWS Web Services account and S3 bucket, you upload your password list, you populate your account settings in Zues7, then your Cloud-Cracker will be ready to work automatically.  It will create an ec2 instance with Ubuntu 22.04, 16GB ram, 200GB SSD, and an Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU w/16GB.  Zues7 will load hashcat and Cuda drivers, upload the hash file, transfer the password list from the S3 bucket, crack the hash(es) or exhaust the wordlist, download the result to your machine, and terminate the instance.

Setting Up AWS

This guide assumes you have set up an AWS Web Services Account already and are working from a Linux or macOS terminal.

If you don’t have an AWS account, here's a guide on how to quickly do this. https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/guides/setup-environment/?pg=gs&sec=gtkaws 

You will need a valid credit card. This....