Welcome to the World of Password Cracks

Being Curious, I just couldn't help but find out how easy it is to crack passwords on documents products. In order to protect oneself from the hacker, one must understand the tools they work with.

Its basically pretty easy. Some passwords are more difficult to crack than others. Depending on how well the password is thought out, the password can be crack in less than once second or as long as 1000+ years. For more on this see: Password Algorythm

If you have a document that you have legitimately lost the password to, and absolutely have no idea what to do about it, I'll crack it for USD 5 (or foreign currency equivalent). You don't have to pay unless I actually crack the document. Payment is based on the honor system. Simply mail me a check or cash after you receive your successfully cracked document. If you hose me, you suck!

PLEASE NOTE: Due to popular demand, I am currently experiencing a backlog of requests that require a pure "brute-force" attack. Usually, I will either be able to crack it right away (via Dictionary attack or sometimes Xieve) or it's going to take a while.

Methods of Attacking a document

Brute-force

Brute-force attack is the slowest approach and can test all the passwords of up to 7 characters. Brute-force is a technique for breaking passwords that tests every conceivable combination of a string of alpha-numeric characters until it hits the right one. Short passwords (i.e. less than 7 characters) are feasible under this method. 

Xieve™ 

Optimization that boosts dramatically Brute-Force attack speed by skipping password checks of nonsense combinations of characters. With 95% recovery rate for English words password search speed is over 75,000,000 passwords per minute. This attack is much faster and is capable of recovering passwords of to 9 characters. In practice, however, Xieve really isn't much more effective than a dictionary attack.

Dictionary Attack

Basically the system tries every word in the dictionary. Dictionary attack is the fastest method - there's no limitation on password length. 

A note on Office Documents

Word 97/2000/2002 and Excel 97/2000/2002 use industry-strength RC4 encryption algorithm that makes instant password calculation impossible. The only way to crack the Office Key is by checking millions passwords per minute.