Word and Excel password recovery
A friend had a confidential Excel file he password protected to prevent others from opening, but he had lost the password for it. Since I hadn’t messed with Office password (in)securities in a while, I went searching for tools that could help him out.
There are a lot(bunches) of pay programs and services out there that will break the password pretty quickly, but since he had plenty of time and less money, free was the best way to go.
MS Word Excel Cracker is the most configurable utility I found. After choosing the file, you can choose the number of characters in the password to try, as well as the character sets to use. It also support dictionary use, but I didn’t find it to be any faster to operate using a dictionary than the brute force.
It is still running, and currently is attempting 7 character passwords. One through six character passwords took a little over a week on a hyperthreaded 2.8ghz PC.
The only complaint I have(if you can even complain about free software) is that if you stop and start the brute force method, you cannot choose which password to begin at. It simply starts all over at the minimum length.
