Any exerience of Office 2016 password crackers?
Discussion
One of my hobbies is family history and last month a cousin in the US who was a writer died. Her family, believing I'm a computer expert because I have a family history website, has sent me a bunch of her files which they think are book chapters or revisions. About 100 of them. They also sent me scans of lots of her password notes!
I haven't got time to try all of those passwords in all of those files. What recommendations do you have,
By the way I seem to be a possible beneficiary! And I never met this cousin...
Every cloud has a silver lining.
I haven't got time to try all of those passwords in all of those files. What recommendations do you have,
By the way I seem to be a possible beneficiary! And I never met this cousin...
Every cloud has a silver lining.
There are a number of factors in successful password cracking of Microsoft office products. The Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_pas...
describes all the different variants that have taken place and the password strength has increased over time. Whilst the article is complicated the key point is that Office 2016 is quite good and so to crack the password you need a number of things. Firstly a powerful PC. There are password hacking tools that recover the password but they will put a serious load on your machine. If you have a well cooled gaming pc then fine it might be alright but if you try and do this on a laptop it will start to throttle or possibly shutdown after running for a few hours at a high processor utilization. I ran one of these tools overnight and it warmed the whole room from a desktop pc it was using so much power.
Secondly, you need a good password cracking tool. I have previously used the Accent office password recovery tool which was good but it doesn't support Office 2016, I don't know the performance of the current toolsets but the one mentioned above looks promising.
Thirdly you said that you had a list of possible passwords sent to you. This is useful because it can be used as the starting point for the password cracking and also limit the search. The key question is the length of the passwords you have on your list. If they are 8 characters and include special characters £,$, etc then probably forget password cracking, you need to test your list of passwords one at a time. If they are 4-5 characters all lower case simple letters and numbers then you are in with a chance to crack the passwords.
Some of the cracking tools will let you download an evaluation copy for you to try,
Hope this is of some use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_pas...
describes all the different variants that have taken place and the password strength has increased over time. Whilst the article is complicated the key point is that Office 2016 is quite good and so to crack the password you need a number of things. Firstly a powerful PC. There are password hacking tools that recover the password but they will put a serious load on your machine. If you have a well cooled gaming pc then fine it might be alright but if you try and do this on a laptop it will start to throttle or possibly shutdown after running for a few hours at a high processor utilization. I ran one of these tools overnight and it warmed the whole room from a desktop pc it was using so much power.
Secondly, you need a good password cracking tool. I have previously used the Accent office password recovery tool which was good but it doesn't support Office 2016, I don't know the performance of the current toolsets but the one mentioned above looks promising.
Thirdly you said that you had a list of possible passwords sent to you. This is useful because it can be used as the starting point for the password cracking and also limit the search. The key question is the length of the passwords you have on your list. If they are 8 characters and include special characters £,$, etc then probably forget password cracking, you need to test your list of passwords one at a time. If they are 4-5 characters all lower case simple letters and numbers then you are in with a chance to crack the passwords.
Some of the cracking tools will let you download an evaluation copy for you to try,
Hope this is of some use
What "ac13" failed to add from the Wiki article is this:
Your best option is to setup a password cracker using the passwords you have been given, and if that fails then try to think up some derivatives.
But you could be in it for the long haul.
Good luck.
Wiki said:
Office 2007–2013 employed 128-bit key AES password protection which remains secure. Office 2016 employed 256-bit key AES password protection which also remains secure.
The Office 97–2003 password protection used 40-bit key RC4 which contains multiple vulnerabilities rendering it insecure.
You might want to read this article on StackExchange about AES256 encryption.The Office 97–2003 password protection used 40-bit key RC4 which contains multiple vulnerabilities rendering it insecure.
Your best option is to setup a password cracker using the passwords you have been given, and if that fails then try to think up some derivatives.
But you could be in it for the long haul.
Good luck.
Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff