How do you recover information from a M$ Word Document when password was lost?

[John Collier]

According to the M$ web site, they don???t publish a way to recover information from a password protected file if you loose the password. That doesn???t surprise me since I know they don???t always publicize all the information that is available on every subject.

I have done the ???unthinkable??? according to M$ and I have officially forgotten the password to one of my M$ Word documents. Could one of you please tell me how I can retrieve the information in my file?

Should be an easy bunny for someone. ;-)

[Ron Kinner · Accepted solution]

Pre Word-97 it was a piece of cake. Post it's a brute force guessing game. Might take up to 20 days but it can be done. Lots of programs out there.

http://www.openwall.com/PR/word.shtml

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Security/Products_and_Tools/Password_Recovery/

http://shareware.search.com/search?cat=237&tag=ex.sa.fd.srch.sa_win&q=password+recovery+word

There's even a service to recover docs for you but it's pretty expensive:

http://www.pwcrack.com/word.shtml

Ron

[Jon Finley]

The following site has a demo you can download (try before buy). If you HAVE to buy it, it's only $37.00

http://lastbit.com/word/default.asp

Jon

[Jon Finley]

Ok..... I read the FULL article. The Demo only recovers a 3 char password. You would have to purchase the full version if it's longer (which I expect it is). :-)

Jon

[Jon Finley]

Coming from the UNIX side, you "might" appreciate this link:
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/Packages/wvDecrypt.html

Jon