Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook

Using John the Ripper to generate a dictionary

John the Ripper is perhaps the favorite password cracker of most penetration testers and hackers in the world. It has lots of features, such as automatically recognizing the most common encryption and hashing algorithms, being able to use dictionaries, and brute force attacks; thus, enabling us to apply rules to dictionary words, to modify them, and to have a richer word list while cracking without the need of storing that list. This last feature is the one that we will use in this recipe to generate an extensive dictionary based on a very simple word list.

Getting ready

We will use the word list generated in the previous recipe, Password profiling with CeWL, to generate a dictionary of possible passwords. ...