To install, simply type # aptitude install john

Debianĭebian differs from other distributions that offer John in their repositories because it offers a nice manual page, although upstream doesn’t have one. As usual please refer to our new Linux Forum for additional help or information.Īlthough, at least on the distributions we tried, the package in named simply “john” with Gentoo making an exception and naming it “johntheripper”, we will make it easy for you and show you how to install it on several known distributions. However, this article might appeal to you also if you are a home user wanting to learn about these kind of things, but be warned: some of the commands presented below will ask a great deal of your CPU time, so maybe it would be better if you had a test machine and/or lots of time and patience, because password cracking attempts may take days, even on a relatively new machine. This article will deal with John from a system administrator’s perspective, so we expect you to have intermediate knowledge about your Linux system, whatever distribution that may be, and that you are a security-conscious person with basic security knowledge. So although it might sound tempting, we recommend you to refrain from any damaging activities, if for nothing else, just because you have great chances to land in a jail cell. Security-related tools are often like a double-edged sword, in that they can be used for good but also for bad things.

Before going any further, we must tell you that although we trust our readers, we do not encourage or condone any malicious activities that may be performed using this tool or any other tools we talked about in the past. For those of you who haven’t yet heard about John the Ripper (hereby called John for brevity), it is a free password cracking tool written mostly in C.

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