John the Ripper Multithreaded Multicore How-To | Linux | John the Ripper must be compiled from source to enable multithreaded support as well to gain the added features of the jumbo patch. It’s not that hard and I’ll show you how! 1. Grab latest patched jumbo version that includes lots of goodies: $ wget http://openwall.com/john/g/john-1.7.9-jumbo-7.tar.bz2 2. Extract $ tar xvf john-1.7.9-jumbo-7.tar.bz2 3. Change to
Upgrade Red Hat / CentOS 5 Password Hashing
Upgrade Red Hat / CentOS 5 Password Hashing | By default, Red Hat / CentOS 5 uses the largely less desirable md5 algorithm for local account password hashing. Bah! Debian / Ubuntu : you are already using SHA-512 – yay! Be sure to mock your fellow Red Hat friends on this topic. (Note: the new Red Hat / CentOS 6 is now SHA-512 by
Set Password Expiration for Linux Accounts
Set Password Expiration for Linux Accounts | For security, it is good to enforce password expiration. Here’s how you do it in Linux. Edit the file /etc/login.defs: sudo nano /etc/login.defs Here you can specify options for password expiration: PASS_MAX_DAYS 90 PASS_MIN_DAYS 7 PASS_MIN_LEN 14 PASS_WARN_AGE 7 Max Days: maximum life of a password Min Days: prevent a second change again for X
Generate Strong Passwords
Generate Strong Passwords | How can I generate strong passwords from the command line? The excellent program apg is fantastic for generating all sorts of passwords. 1. Install apg: $ sudo apt-get install apg 2. Then you can simply run $ apg …which will run default options and give something like this: stmiller@li166-66:~$ apg Please enter some random data
