Lab 5 was one of my favorite assignments. I created users, assigned passwords, and used sudo cat shadow to convert the users’ credentials into a hash file. Then, I used John the Ripper and rockyou.txt to crack the passwords stored in the hash file.

The John the Ripper tool gave me the most trouble. I struggled to get it to run, mostly because of rockyou.txt. I tried to use it because I glanced over the .gz part of the file name. I eventually used gunzip to get into a usable form.

This assignment emphasized the importance of a strong password and how easy it is for someone to crack hashes.