Cracking a Password With John The Ripper and Hashcat

Oops I forgot my password.. Trying Password Crackers For The First Time

Table of Contents

John The Ripper
— Installation
— Zip2John
— Wordlist Mode (Dictionary)
— Incremental Mode (Brute Force)
— Mask Mode

HashCat
— Installation
— Straight Attack Mode (Dictionary)
— — Rules
— — Creating A Rule Set
— Brute Force Attack Mode
— — Custom Char Sets & Masks

I recently came across a password-protected zip file from over 10 years ago but I had forgotten the password that was used. I had heard about password crackers but until now never had the need to use one. So I thought I’d give it a go. I also have an NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU that could help speed things along.

As it was over 10 years old, the password was unlikely to be long nor complex. I fumbled my way through using John The Ripper in default mode and within a couple of hours was pleasantly surprised when it managed to find a match within half a minute. Granted…