Some more popular examples are: NTLM, MD4, SHA512. We do so by passing our original data through an algorithm – hashing algorithm. Hashes Hashing, most simply put, is the act of taking a piece of data (of any length) and representing it in another shape, that is of fixed length. For Windows, there’s also the Hash Suite, developed by a John the Ripper Contributor. It is also worth mentioning that John will work on all of the three most common operating systems – Windows, MacOS, and Linux-based distros.

John is extremely versatile, most importantly, it is extremely fast, with a really big range of compatible types of hashes, not just the most common ones like SHA1, SHA256, MD5, etc.

Intro John The Ripper, or John for short, is one of the most well known password and hash cracking tools out there.