Today I bumped into this interesting perl script password cracker from the guys over at linuxshellaccount.blogspot.com. This works by using perl’s built in crypt function to guess password in an attempt to crack them. A word list is required for this to work.

Calling up the script is simple as executing any perl script (./pwdcheck). We have option of choosing between checking for a list of password or just one password. In this example I chose a list of password, the wordlist and where my passwd file is located. The rest is a guessing game.

Ofcourse no wordlist in this world is large, comples or diverse enough to crack my password, it was fun watching it attempt nonetheless.

From the site:

It’s no lie that this method of password cracking is far less sophisticated than the methods used by products like John The Ripper, etc. However, it does demonstrate how the crypt function works and what really goes on at the guts of all of those types of programs (JTR, for instance, uses fastcrypt and does its own word manipulation outside of the “guessing” routine).