John the Ripper in Action
John is really easy to use, you just type “john” and the password file to crack and John takes off running. John will attempt to automatically detect the hashes from the password file. If it can’t it will prompt you to enter the correct encryption format using the “--format=” command. The following screenshot is an example of cracking a large SHA1 password dump using John:
➢ john [password_hash_list] --format=Raw-SHA1
As I mentioned earlier, for a CPU based cracker, John is fast. In the example above, I fed John a list of over 16 million hashes. It found over 2 million of the passwords I was trying to crack in about ...