Ethical Hacking: John the Ripper

In this course you will learn how to do hash cracking. Hashing is one of the corner stones of cyber security and knowing how to crack hashes is essential for Ethical Hackers. Many passwords are stored in a hash format, the hash function is used in many places including for Windows passwords, Linux passwords and often for databases of web apps. Database leaks often contain password hashes, but what to do with them? You can crack them.

There are many tools which you can use for hash cracking, one of them is John the Ripper. John the ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix and Windows. The program uses word mangling, permutations, pattern matching, and some other tricks. John runs on multiple operating systems. It’s also highly multithreaded and can make use of multiprocessor systems, which means it can make use of the complete power of your server cluster. In this course we’ll also cover some other tools for hash cracking.

In this Ethical Hacking course you will learn how to crack various hashes including Windows password hashes and all the common hash formats. This is a beginners course and no prior knowledge of hash cracking is required. It can be beneficial if you run Kali Linux, but this is by no means required to follow the course.