The tool can look at the characters that make up the hash to possibly identify which type of hash it is and what it may be used for. The aim of this online tool is to help identify a hash type. In this case Pl3m5Y95 is the salt and t3Nk4zEXTCXDP4Vs4cL0p0 is the hash.
![]() ![]() What it does allow you to do, however, is determine whether two files are identical or not without knowing anything about their contents.For this reason, the idea that the result is unique is fundamental to the whole concept of hashes. How Hashes Establish IdentityHashes cannot be reversed, so simply knowing the result of a file’s hash from a hashing algorithm does not allow you to reconstruct the file’s contents. As we’ll see in a moment, regardless of whether you’re using Windows, Mac or Linux, the hash value will be identical for any given file and hashing algorithm. Passing the result to Format-List also gives a more reader-friendly output:For Mac and Linux users, the command line tools shasum and md5 serve the same purpose. By default, it will use the SHA-2 256 algorithm:You can change to another algorithm by specifying it after the filepath with the -Algorithm switch. Easy to use movie software for macNow, we get a more accurate result indicating the files are indeed different as expected:Given a unique identifier for a file, we can use this information in a number of ways. Here the output is from the command line on macOS using the Terminal.app, but you can see that the ship.jpg hash value is the same as we got from PowerShell earlier:Let’s calculate the hash value with SHA-2 256. For example, the contents of the following two files, ship.jpg and plane.jpg are clearly different, as a simple visual inspection shows, so they should produce different message digests.However, when we calculate the value with MD5 we get a collision, falsely indicating that the files are identical. Hash Tool Download Is GenuineYou will see hash values provided in digital signatures and certificates in many contexts such as code signing and SSL to help establish that a file, website or download is genuine.Hash values are also a great aid to security researchers, SOC teams, malware hunters, and reverse engineers. All the attacker has to do is add an extra byte to the end of a file and it will produce a different hash.This is such a simple process that malware authors can automate the process such that the same URL will deliver the same malware to victims with a different hash every few seconds.Second, the flaw in legacy AV has always been that detection requires foreknowledge of the threat, so by-design an anti-malware solution that relies on a database of known hash values is always one-step behind the next attack.The answer to that, of course, is a security solution that leverages behavioral AI and which takes a defense-in-depth approach.However, that doesn’t mean hash values have no value! On the contrary, being able to identify a file uniquely still has important benefits. That’s very likely due in large part to malware authors realizing that they can fool AV engines that rely on hashes into not recognizing a sample very easily. It has been estimated that there are upwards of 500,000 unique malware samples appearing every day. On scanning a system, the AV engine calculates a hash value for each executable file on the user’s machine and tests to see if there is a match in its database.This must have seemed like a neat solution in the early days of cyber security, but it’s not hard to see the flaws in relying on hash values given hindsight.First, as the number of malware samples has exploded, keeping up a database of signatures has become a task that simply doesn’t scale. They do this by keeping an internal database of hash values belonging to known malware. The hash search has led us to the TrueContext ID, which we can pivot off to really dive down the rabbit hole and see exactly what this file did: what processes it created, what files it modified, what URLs it contacted and so on. In this case, we’ll just use the file’s SHA1 hash, and we’ll look for its existence over the last 3 months.Great, we can see there’s been a few instances, but the magic doesn’t stop there. Click the Visibility icon in the SentinelOne management console and start a new query. Let’s take a look at an example of how an IT admin could search for threats across their fleet using hash values in the SentinelOne management console.Hashes are really helpful when you identify a threat on one machine and want to query your entire network for existence of that file. Using hash values, researchers can reference malware samples and share them with others through malware repositories like VirusTotal, VirusBay, Malpedia and MalShare.Threat hunting is also made easier thanks to hash values. Even so, as we have seen above, two files can have the same behaviour and functionality without necessarily having the same hash, so relying on hash identity for AV detection is a flawed approach.Despite that, hashes are still useful for security analysts for such things as sharing IOCs and threat-hunting, and you will undoubtedly encounter them on a daily basis if you work anywhere in the field of computer and network security.Like this article? Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube or Facebook to see the content we post.
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