“John the Ripper is an open source password cracker that is used by security researchers to help audit, crack and test password security. The core project is sponsored by security vendor Openwall led by developers Alexander Peslyak and Roman Rusakov. Thanks to funding from security vendor Rapid7, leaders of the open source Metasploit project, Peslyak and Rusakov were able to expand John the Ripper with improved performance and capabilities for testing and cracking password hashes.

“John the Ripper is a tool I have used since the mid-90s, the team behind it has dedicated a large portion of their to the open source community and improving the security of open source software in general,” HD Moore, Metasploit chief architect and Rapid7 CSO said.