Purpose: - To learn more through the understanding and need for complex passwords, password cracking techniques and arc tables rainbow thanks to the use of John the Ripper. Materials: - John the Ripper will be used to crack the passwords of Windows XP user accounts. - PWDump7 will be used to acquire the hashes that make up the passwords of user accounts on the Windows XP virtual machine. - Windows Notepad will be used to edit, create and save files. - Windows XP will be running on a virtual machine. - VMware Player is the virtual machine player on which Windows 2000 Pro and XP will run. - An HP laptop running Windows 8.1 will be used to run VMware Player, which is then used to run John the Ripper on Windows XP. Procedures and ResultsPWDump7 will first be used to acquire the hashes which are the passwords for user accounts on a Windows XP system. PWDump7.exe will be copied from the downloaded D2L file and pasted into C:WINDOWSsystem32. Once PWDump7.exe is pasted into C:WINDOWSsystem32, the file will be executed via Command Prompt. The command “pwdump7 >> C:Log.txt” will be typed into the command prompt. This command indicates that pwdump7.exe will run and send its output in a file name "Log.txt" on the C drive. The contents of the file consist of the hashes that constitute the Windows XP passwords of users on this system . This will conclude the use of PWDump7. John the Ripper will now be used to determine user passwords based on hashes created by PWDump7. The Log.txt file created from running PWDump7 will now be moved from the C drive to the same file folder containing the John the Ripper files. In this case, the "Log.txt" file will be moved to "C:Documents and SettingsAdministratorDesk...... middle of paper...... any user to use and add as well. The software developers who created John the Ripper and John the Ripper Pro also sell a collection of this same product. The speed at which John the Ripper was able to crack passwords made up of words was immensely faster than passwords containing uppercase letters with lowercase letters. letters and numbers. It took John the Ripper 1 second to crack the password "password" on one of the created Windows XP accounts. For the password "F18H0rnet", on another account created, John the Ripper had not yet cracked the password after 30 minutes. A GPU processing card, like the NVIDIA Tesla K40, packs 1.4 Tflops of power from 2880 processing cores and would be an incredible asset if password cracking becomes a more common occurrence or the need to decipher words complex passwords quickly and efficiently. the way was necessary.