After a review of Windows hashing and an example of 1-digit hashing, we will give you two challenges—one with a 2-digit password and one with a 7-digit password. Here's how Windows hashes look in Python:

The algorithm uses hashlib to do an MD4 for the hash of the password, but before you do that, encode in Unicode which is utf-16le, and then calculate the hexdigest of the results to get the long number, The number starts with 464, in this case, which is a Windows password hash.

Thus, you can write a program that will try all the characters in this string, which will consist of 10 digits, and then calculate the hash for each one of them. You will be left with a simple dictionary with 10 values:

You can crack this 1-digit hash using a 1-digit password as follows:

So, here's a challenge. The password is a 2-digit one between 00 and 99, and this is the hash:

So, you have to make a loop that tries 100 possible values.

The next one is a 7-digit password, and this is the hash:

So, you'll have to try 10 million values. That will only take a few seconds, and that's why Windows password hashes are so very weak—you can try many millions of them per second.