From barebones AWS instance to John the Ripper ripping some passwords.

The Procedure

Get the Amazon Compute Instance

Get the compute instance request going, get the node fired up, and get logged in.

I use the private key for the machine, which was provided to me by Amazon, to ssh into the machine like this:

$ ssh -i my_amazon_key.pem ubuntu@<ip of amazon machine>

Then I'm in - I don't need a password.

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install -Y unzip
$ apt-get install -Y build-essential
$ apt-get install -Y libssl-dev

I usually go with the latest jumbo file, in this case 1.8.0.6-1.

Download the zip file and extract it.

<pre. $ unzip JohnTheRipper-1.8.0.6-jumbo-1.zip

Now change to JohnTheRipper/src directory and run the configure script:

$ cd JohTheRipper-1.8.0.6-jumbo-1/src/
$ ./configure

This will create a Makefile. The default install directory is self-contained: it's ../run/

so you can make everything:

$ make 
$ make install

Now you can go use your John binary:

$ cd ../run
$ ./john -test

First, I checked out the SecLists repo from Github: https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists

Then I checked out nosecleaner, a Github repo with my Python wireless scripts: https://github.com/charlesreid1/nosecleaner