So I figured it’s time to test-drive password-cracking tools properly after chatting with a cybersecurity buddy. Had some dusty hashes lying around from a decade-old text file backup—totally forgot what password I used back then. Perfect guinea pig material. Here’s exactly how I messed around with John the Ripper and Elasticsearch’s Elastic Agent Collector (EAC), no jargon crap included.
The Setup Phase
First, grabbed John from its official site and Elastic Agent from Elastic’s page. Installed both on Ubuntu via terminal commands—felt like a nerd pasting lines into that black box. John unpacked easy enough, but Elastic Agent? Had to tweak firewall rules for an hour before its dashboard finally showed up green.
Stuck my old MD5 hash (looks like “5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99”) into a text file called “target_*”. Dropped it into John’s “run” folder alongside a wordlist file named “common_*”—buncha simple passwords like “123456” and “qwerty” copied from some forum thread.
Cracking Attempts with John
Opened terminal, sprinted to John’s directory:
./john –wordlist=common_* –format=raw-md5 target_*
Boom! Instantly spat out “password” as the result. No fireworks, just a blunt “cracked” message. Tried again with a salted hash from an old forum dump—added “–format=md5crypt-long” flag this time. Took 18 minutes chewing through the wordlist before puking out “sunshine1”.
- Upside: Feels like driving a manual car—no frills, but you control throttle
- Downer: Ran into “No password hashes loaded” errors twice because I typo’d the filename
Switching to Elastic Agent Collector
Launched Kibana, configured Fleet integration for EAC. Spun up a Linux agent pointing at my hash file. Added custom detection rules flagging hashcat patterns—thought I was slick till nothing popped in SIEM alerts. Turned out I’d messed up the regex filter (“[a-f0-9]” didn’t catch uppercase hex).
Fixed the rule, resent data:
Shazam—got live alerts showing brute-force patterns within 5 minutes. Dashboard highlighted failed attempts in red and successful cracks in green, kinda like traffic lights. Saved the results as CSV… until the whole Elastic node crashed because I’d left verbose logging on. Lesson: always throttle log levels.
Epiphany Moments
- John’s for when you just want quick answers—terminal warrior style
- EAC’s like surveillance cameras: shows attack patterns live but needs babysitting
- Both failed against newer bcrypt hashes—time to bother my buddy again
Tools work? Mostly. Fun? Hell yes. But turns out password hygiene still rules. Now I just delete old hashes instead of cracking ’em.
