PASSWORD Cracking with John-The-Ripper

John the Ripper is one of the most Important password cracking tool which is being taught is Certified Ethical Hacking - CEH Training. Passwords are nowadays the user authentication to prove identity in the web. It is the only medium through which user can access the resources. It needs to be a secret and accessed by only one who is authorized to use it.
A password should be strong at least of 8 characters which should be a combination of at least one number, alphanumerical character to study few of the commonly used passwords are 123456, password, qwerty and much more which can be easily cracked by a dictionary based attack. According to studies over 10 million passwords are available on the public web.
John the Ripper is used to finding out the weak passwords.is is an open source tool. It was developed for Unix OS initially, now works for the various platform. It is very popular web pentesting and breaking tool.
Working with John, the Ripper
Create a user user1
Password here is password1


Similarly
Create another user user2
Password password2


Now crack the password using John the Ripper
John –wordlist=/usr/share/john/password.lst /root/johns_passwd


Show passwords using
John –show /root/johns_passwd

As we can see it is very easy to crack a weak password. There are lots and lots of tools available in the market along with dictionary so one has to choose a password smartly.
Password Cracking is one of the important steps of Penetration Testing. A password can give access to the whole system or a server sometimes. So, it is advised to use a strong password always which is not easy to guess as well as cannot be cracked easily.

Codec Networks offer Certified Ethical Hacker is a skilled professional who has the knowledge of weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the system and how to breach the target system as a hacker's perspective but in a lawful and legitimate manner.This course prepares for EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker exam 312-50.