Using John

Last Updated: 11/19/2024

This post is going to discuss some of the practical hands on approach to using John.

Project 1:

Let’s Say we have just installed John. Unspoken but behind the scenes this means there is a default ruleset and a default set of wordlists which have been installed. But we are going to ignore this for the moment.

Let’s say set you use the https://tobtu.com/lmntlm.php web page to create a hash. And we pick something simple: like: aaa. We could then stick it in a file named hash0.

user0:E24106942BF38BCF57A6A4B29016EFF6

Then we could use john on it.

john --format:LM hash0.txt

Let’s take a break from that. As this might take a period of time. Let’s create a file named hashlist.txt and the only thing we are going to put in our word list is the single entry of ‘aaa’ which is our password.

aaa

Now we can re-run john using our wordlist and get — well let’s call it an instant answer.

root@nodey:~/john# john --format:LM hash0.txt --wordlist=wordlist.txt
Loaded 2 password hashes with no different salts (LM [DES 128/128 SSE2-16])
Warning: poor OpenMP scalability for this hash type, consider --fork=2
Will run 2 OpenMP threads
Press 'q' or Ctrl-C to abort, almost any other key for status
0g 0:00:00:00 100% 0g/s 12.50p/s 12.50c/s 25.00C/s AAA
Session completed