active password cracking tool John the Ripper is a tool designed to help systems administrators to find weak (easy to guess or crack through brute force) passwords, and even automatically mail users warning them about it, if it is desired. Besides several crypt(3) password hash types most commonly found on various Unix flavors, supported out of the box are Kerberos AFS and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM hashes, plus several more with contributed patches.