John the Ripper is an open source tool used to test the strength of passwords by cracking hashes using multiple techniques such as dictionary attacks, brute force, mask attacks, and hybrid attacks. It supports different types of hashes such as MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, NTLM, Kerberos, and others, making it a powerful tool for testing the security of passwords and retrieving them in different systems. The potential harms of this tool are that it can be used to hack weak passwords and exploit them to gain unauthorized access to accounts and systems. It can also be used to hack databases containing hashed and poorly protected passwords, which may lead to sensitive data leaks and privacy violations. To protect against these risks, it is recommended to use strong hashing algorithms such as bcrypt, scrypt, and Argon2 with the addition of Salt to make the process of cracking hashes more difficult. It is also necessary to adopt strong and long passwords that contain a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols, in addition to activating two-factor authentication (2FA) and reducing the storage of passwords as much as possible. It is also preferable to continuously monitor security systems to analyze any attempts to decrypt and take the necessary measures for protection.

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