John Ripper is a password cracking software. Presently this software is available for different versions of Unix platform. The officially supported versions are John Ripper 11. It is mainly used to detect the weak passwords in the Unix system. John Ripper also works on Windows platform with different patches. This software is able to crack several crypt (3) passwords.

Purchasing John Ripper is very simple. The user can order a CD and it can be used in the scenario where it doesn’t even require a hard disk. You also don’t require installing a different operating system to run this software. Startup of John Ripper can be done by performing the following steps:

· Boot the machine with the CD
· Enter into the shell
· With the setup tool the user can optionally configure the network (required if the user needs to transfer the files to the temporary memory)

The program can be started and the booted system will be fully functional. The user can do the remote shell access.

A modern and enriched password cracker is also available with John Ripper.