John The Ripper
John the Ripper (JTR) is a very useful and fast password cracking program. It is a favourite among hackers for cracking .htpasswd (DES) encrypted passwords and now can handle other encryptions such as LM and MD5. This is a very useful tool and is completely free too. This tutorial shows you how to install and run it in standard mode.
Starting JTR
This tutorial assumes that you are using Windows, however it is available for Mac and Linux operating systems and is used the same way:
First of all download it from Here and extract it to your drive e.g. (C:\john1701) If you are using a newer version since the article has been written, just change the commands below to fit the new version name.
Press WIN + R and type "cmd" and search for "cmd" on your PC and select to open Command Prompt. Type:
To go to the root of your drive. Then type:
And you should be in the folder containing JTR. Test this by typing:
You will now be greeted with the JTR welcome screen which will look similar to this:
Okay, time to try it out. Get your encrypted file (if you don't have one, use this example: thisislegal:cGPV5pzv1OdLQ) and create a new file in the run folder called pass.txt and copy and paste your encrypted password string into the text file. Now, to run JTR in default mode all you have to do is type:
And it should begin cracking the hash. You can hold space or any other key down to check its progress. Passwords 1-5 characters in length can be cracked in seconds. 6-7 can take around an hour depending on the password and longer than 7 can take a few days to crack. This tutorial is only going to cover cracking password in the default mode. Another good option though is the -wordlist option which allows you to try cracking the password using a wordlist. Just type john in cmd again and look at all the available usage options.
When cracked, the password will be displayed on screen and john will exit. This screenshot below shows when JTR cracks the example password above:
And that concludes this short tutorial. JTR is a very easy to use program once you know how, for further help consult the readme.