Parts of this article appear to be AI-generated.
1. The section beginning with "If you are interested in the respective hashcat masks for the passwords cracked above," is most obviously AI-generated as it makes no sense. Quote:
>
>
> Mask: ?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1
>
> Explanation: This mask is for a pattern that starts and ends with angle brackets. Inside, it follows a pattern of "Passw0rd" followed by a digit, repeated twice. However, Hashcat doesn't directly support angle brackets in its mask. An option would be to handle these characters separately or use a custom charset (?1) to represent them.
Angle brackets aren't special characters in masks: https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=mask_attack
If angle brackets were special characters in masks and had to be represented by ?1 as a workaround, this mask is unrelated to the explanation, since it would match passwords consisting only of angle brackets.
"handle these characters separately" isn't a thing.
The mask doesn't have anything to do with matching "Passw0rd".
Several other masks from the page do not match their accompanying passwords.
Most of them are just showing the uppercase letters, lowercase letters and digits in the password. E.g. "We matched Hello123World with a mask matching 1 uppercase letter, 4 lowercase letters, 3 digits, 1 uppercase letter, and 4 lowercase letters." This doesn't explain why anyone should use that mask instead of, say, 1 uppercase letter, 4 lowercase letters, 2 digits, 1 uppercase letter, and 5 lowercase letters. This is obviously not the mask they used, but an AI working backwards from the password.
2. The password "Cloudy-Envelope-Rainbow-Dinosaur" is 32 characters long, including the hyphens, not 29 as the article says. The password "Sunset$Guitar$Puzzle$Journey" consists of 28 characters, including the dollar signs, not 27 as the article says.
3. The "Conclusion" section smells strongly of AI. Windows was only mentioned in passing, yet the conclusion says the whole article is about Windows. MFA wasn't mentioned at all until this point. Defence in depth wasn't mentioned.