The Pro version, designed for use by professional pen testers, has additional features such as bigger, multilingual wordlists, performance optimizations and 64-bit architecture support.
An enhanced “jumbo” community release has also been made available on the open-source GitHub repo. The tool comes in both GNU-licensed and proprietary (Pro) versions.
It was designed to test password strength, brute-force encrypted (hashed) passwords, and crack passwords via dictionary attacks. First released in 1996, John the Ripper (JtR) is a password cracking tool originally produced for UNIX-based systems.
