Brute force password hashes

In this recipe, we will crack hashes using John the Ripper in brute force mode. We will work with a local shadow file from a Linux machine and we will try to recover passwords by brute forcing them.

Getting ready

Let's ensure the following prerequisites:

• Your Kali machine is powered up
• You have some sample users and passwords setup on your Linux machine add some more and make a couple accounts with random 4 character passwords.
• You copied the shadow file to your Kali root directory

How to do it...

We will use a brute force method of attack...