Technical requirements

You will need a system (or two systems) on which to run hashcat and John. Virtual machines (VMs) are useful for documenting and testing software, but they will be limited in the system resources you can use (number of CPU cores and GPUs).

Hashcat will require NVIDIA or AMD drivers for best effectiveness, and these are often easier to install in Windows. As such, you may want to set up hashcat in Windows, which is what we will walk through in this chapter. On the other hand, we will install John on a Linux system, as the installation is more straightforward in that operating system. However, you can absolutely take a different approach. That being said, you will need a system to install these on, and we recommend it be a “real” (not virtualized) system.

Installing and introducing John

John (short for John the Ripper) has a long history dating back to the 1990s. The current major version as of this writing is 1.9.0. While this release originally...