Opening Files When You Forget The Password
When you create a
password, you are probably well advised to write it down and keep it
in a secure place. If you lose the password (according to Microsoft),
you cannot open or gain access to the password-protected document.
The document is encrypted and without the password or the encryption
key, it cannot be opened. Not being able to open a password protected
file can potentially be a very costly issue. If a password to a
critical file has been lost or the employee knowing the password
leaves or dies, valuable data and hundreds of people-hours could be
involved.
Fortunately there
are some third party services and utilities for finding a missing
password. These third party services and utilities are not free and
can take several weeks so you need to estimate the cost of the loss
before proceeding. Some of the utilities involve dictionary-based
solutions and others use the brute force method where every possible
combination of characters is used. One company even uses an approach
that looks for data encryption keys. Since the maximum length of a
password is 15 characters, the brute force method is reasonably
possible with enough computing power. The following are some Web sites
that provide password cracking utilities and/or password recovery
services:
Example
Source of Software to Recover MS Excel Passwords
Basically these tools don’t guess your password, they simply extract
the data and open it in a blank Excel file. Please be warned that
password cracking web sites frequently feature pornography, so
searching for this topic at the office in plain view of others might
not be a good idea. For stubborn cases, you might consider using a
password cracking service; some of these services offer a money back
guarantee. If they don’t crack the password, you don’t pay.
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