RIPEMD‐128 is an ISO/IEC standard cryptographic hash function proposed in 1996 by Dobbertin, Bosselaers and Preneel. The compression function of RIPEMD‐128 consists of two different and almost independent parallel lines denoted by line1 operation and line2 operation. The initial values and the output values of the last step of the two operations are combined, resulting in the final value of one iteration. In this study, the authors present collision differential characteristics for both 40‐step line1 operation and 40‐step line2 operation by choosing a proper message difference. By using message modification technique, they improve the probabilities of the differential characteristics so that they can give a collision attack on 40‐step RIPEMD‐128 hash function with a complexity of 2 35 computations. Meanwhile, they improve the distinguishing attack proposed by Landelle and Peyrin at EUROCRYPT 2013, and give a distinguisher on the full RIPEMD‐128 hash function with a complexity of 2 90.4 by doing message modification.