Apparently I’ve been inadvertently running a password cracker library while trying to test out building my VirtualBox image. Couldn’t figure out why I was getting files with extensions of .hwm, .pwd, and .pwi, rather than getting some sort of console output when I ran ‘packer build packer.json’ Now I know . And I hope that the new alias added for packer in my .bashrc helps me explain, if and when the security team visits.