This is where CRC32 shines. You can brute force all 8-character lowercase passwords in minutes.
# All 8-character lowercase letters (26^8 = 208 billion combos)
hashcat -m 11500 -a 3 crc32_hash.txt ?l?l?l?l?l?l?l?l
On a single RTX 4090, Hashcat can test over 20-30 billion CRC32 hashes per second. Yes, billion with a 'b'. That means an 8-character brute force finishes in under 10 seconds. hashcat crc32
A ZIP file's local header includes CRC32 of the uncompressed data. If the data is missing but the CRC32 is intact, you might recover a small file. For a 16-byte text string, brute force is feasible. This is where CRC32 shines
Use incremental masks or mask files for ranges: --increment --increment-min=1 --increment-max=6 On a single RTX 4090, Hashcat can test