Purpose:- Get more through understanding and needing strong passwords, password cracking techniques and rainbow tables through using John the Ripper. Materials:- John the Ripper will be used to crack Windows XP user account passwords. - PWDump7 will be used to capture 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 run on a virtual machine. - VMware Player is the virtual machine player on which Windows 2000 Pro and XP will run. - An HP laptop with Windows 8.1 will be used to run VMware Player, which will then be used to run John the Ripper on Windows XP.Procedures and ResultsPWDump7 will first be used to capture the hashes that make up user account passwords on a Windows XP system. PWDump7.exe will be copied from the downloaded D2L file and pasted into C:WINDOWSsystem32. Once you paste PWDump7.exe into C:WINDOWSsystem32, the file will run via Command Prompt. The command “pwdump7 >> C:Log.txt” will be entered into the command prompt. This command indicates that pwdump7.exe will run and send its output to a file name “Log.txt” on drive C. The contents of the file are the hashes that make up Windows XP passwords for users of this system. This will conclude the use of PWDump7. John the Ripper will now be used to figure out user passwords based on the hashes created by PWDump7. The Log.txt file created by running PWDump7 will now be moved from the C drive to the same file folder that has the John the Ripper files inside it. In this case, the "Log.txt" file will be moved to "C:Documents and SettingsAdministratorDesk...... center of the sheet...... any user to use and add. The software developers who created John the Ripper and John the Ripper Pro also sell a collection of this same item. The speed at which John the Ripper was able to crack passwords made up of words was immensely faster than passwords that contained uppercase 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 created account, John the Ripper had yet to crack it after 30 minutes GPU compute processors, such as the NVIDIA Tesla K40, pack 1.4 Tflops of power from 2880 compute cores and would be an incredible asset to have if password cracking becomes a more common occurrence or the need to crack complex passwords in a timely and efficient manner . the way was necessary.