John the Ripper is a widely used open-source password cracking utility designed for password security auditing and recovery. Its primary function is to test the strength of passwords by attempting to crack password hashes using various attack methods, such as brute-force, dictionary, and hybrid attacks.
John the Ripper operates offline. It takes password hashes—often extracted from system files or databases—and systematically attempts to discover the plaintext password by comparing the hash of each guess to the target hash. If a match is found, the password is considered cracked.
Follow these steps:
Step 1: Download the “John the Ripper” tool.
Step 2: Unzip the downloaded file on your computer.
Step 3: After unzipping the file, change the name from “XYZ” to “John” and save it on your PC.
Step 4: Now, open the unzipped file and open the “Run” folder in it.
Step 5: After opening the Run folder, create a New Folder and name it “Crack.”
Step 6: Copy the password-protected ZIP file you desire to break the password and paste it into the Crack folder.
Step 7: Go back to the desktop screen and open Command Prompt.
Step 8: Execute the command “cd desktop/john/run” on the command prompt and press enter.
Step 9: Now execute the command “ZIP2john.exe crack/YourFileName.ZIP>crack/Key.txt” and press the Enter key. This will create ZIP file password hashes for cracking the password from the ZIP file.
Step 10: After the above step, pass hashes will be created in the “Crack” folder we created before. Password Hash can now be checked in the same folder.
Step 11: Now, using the same password hash, we will use a simple command and crack the password from the ZIP file. Go to the command prompt and execute the following “john –format=ZIP crack/key.txt” command and press the Enter key. Your ZIP file password will be cracked after this step.
Note: If the password is simple, the tool will take a short time, but if the password is complex, the tool will take some minutes to crack the password.
