DES cracking Question

After a session of Google Hacking, I came upon a treasure trove known as passwd on a website. I took it upon myself as a cracking challenge. I compiled a wordlist from many different smaller wordlists, and fired up John the Ripper. I've now cracked most of the passwords, but I was wondering, why are they all 8 digit numbers. I attempted to log in with them, but they don't work, and they aren't base64 or hex, so what are they encoded in? I would give you the url of the passwd file, but I want to be the first to hack it :) Thanks for your help in advance.

Are you sure you're logging in to the right place and that the password file you found is the one being used to validate logins?

I can't think what the 8 digit numbers could be other than the passwords.

The file's name is passwd, and it's in cgi-bin, so idk what it could possibly be besides encrypted passwords.

But that doesn't mean those encrypted passwords are for whatever login form you are entering them in.

Agree with Moshbat