Hashcat

Have those hashes and wanna crack em faster than any other open source password cracker out there? You would definitely want to take this tool for a spin. This tool is very comparable to John the ripper with a number of supported hashing algorithms and word mangling rules that you can throw at it. For more info, check out the authors website at http://hashcat.net.

You can generate your own hashes to crack: # echo -n "password" | openssl md5 > hash.txt

To crack SHA1 hashes using a wordlist:

# ./hashcat-cli.bin -a 0 -m 100 hashes.txt wordlist.lst //crack sha1 hashes in hashes.txt

To perform a bruteforce attack for the MD5 hash:

# ./hashcat-cli-bin -a 3 -m 0 --bf-pw-max=4 hash.txt //bruteforce the md5 hashes in hash.txt with a password length max of 4

# ./hashcat-cli.bin -h //for more help and options

Resources / Good Reading:

http://hashcat.net

https://contest.korelogic.com/team_hashcat.html