I have an MS Word doc on my PC, and I keep some personal info in it, so about a month ago I password-protected it.
The problem is that I have now forgotten the !@#%* password.
Is there any hope, or should I just assume that the contents are lost forever to me?
Googling the phrase “crack password on microsoft word file” reveals that there are a variety of software products which purport to be able to recover such a password. I don’t know anything about them.
Is it 1234?
That sounds like something an idiot would have on his luggage.
(Yeah I know there is usually a 5 at the end of that.)
Can you open it in another program, like notepad or something?
Depending on what the information is worth to you, you might find something you can use in this link
I have the Passware kit that I use with my work that I would be willing to run your document through. That will be up to you to determine how confidential the data is and whether you want to trust someone you’ve never met with it. I’ll just add that I work in data processing in a hospital and have more reams of regulations governing confidentiality to deal with than Enron could run through a shredder in a day.
My email is in my profile if you want to go that route.
Thanks guys, for all the advice.
The good news is that I remembered the password.
If I hadn’t though, I’m not sure I would trust any of the cracking programs that require me to upload my document to a server.
Before remembering the password, I was leaning more towards using perl and Win32::OLE to open the document with multiple passwords. I remembered the first several characters, so I just had to go over all combinations of the remaining few characters.
Even that, though, would take a while. If a password character can be any of the 26 letters, lower or upper case, plus the 10 number digits, then all the combinations would be 62^N, where N is the number of characters you want to go over.
With just four characters, you need to go over 14,776,336 combinations, and even if each one takes 1 second, you need 4,104 hours, or 171 days to try all combinations!
be careful with cracker programs. I had a .pdf that was locked and had to get it open. A couple of the programs had spyware I ended up having to deal with. The other problem is that a brute force crack is incredibly long. If you think it’s alphanumeric or dictionary based (even not a specific word) the crack time lowers tremendously.
You can also try to crack the encryption key itself, but IIRC this can also take an absolutely enormous amount of time without extensive equipment or crappy encryption.
If it’s anything like r40fisso2 you’re probably SOL. (actually, you can do a reasonable brute-force up to MAYBE 6 characters, with a very fast machine, over night, possibly… Maybe you can only get up to 5 before it becomes ridiculously long)
Have you tried “password” “qwerty” and the names of significant places people or events that might have occured to you as a password?
ETA: okkkkkk preview is my friend
Preview is my friend
As it turns out, Win32::OLE takes about 10ms per attempt on my machine, so for 4 characters, it will take “only” 41 hours.
Of course, when you go to 5 characters, it takes 3.5 months !