Today, I messed around with something called “John Webb.” It’s not a person, in case you’re wondering, It’s a tool for cracking passwords, I guess.
Getting Started
First, I gotta downloaded it. Find a safe place to put it on my computer.
Figuring It Out
I’m start to try, I opened up my terminal. You know, that black box with the blinking cursor where you type in commands. It’s kinda like the command center for your computer.
I typed in john --help. This is like asking the program, “Hey, show me what you can do!” It spit out a whole bunch of options and explanations. Honestly, a lot of it was gibberish to me at first, I just take my time to try.
My First Attempt
I had a file called “*” with some example password hashes in it, to keep safe and my personnel information, I did’t use my importment password to try. I wanted to see if John could crack them. So I typed something like john *.
The program started chugging away. It was trying different combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols, like a little digital detective. I have to wait…
The Result
After some watiing, John cracked some of the passwords! It printed them out on the screen, all happy and proud of itself. Some of the passwords were super simple, like “123456” or “password”. Seriously, who uses those passwords? It’s a good reminder to use stronger ones.
Experimenting More
I wanted to see what else John could do. I tried using some of the different options I saw earlier. Like, I told it to only use lowercase letters, or to try passwords of a certain length. It’s like giving it specific instructions to narrow down the search.
What I Learned
- Simple passwords are easy to crack. Like, duh!
- John Webb is a pretty powerful tool. It can do a lot of different things.
- There are many different algorithms, and these are some of the more popular ones:
- bcrypt
- md5crypt
- sha512crypt
- Password cracking takes time. It’s not like in the movies where they crack a password in seconds.
- I need to learn more about all those options and commands. There’s a lot more to explore.
It’s pretty cool to see how this stuff works, even if it’s just a little experiment. I am be able to try more in the future!
