A fair while ago I found a document on my machine that was in a folder with short stories, poems, notes, and book ideas. Now I only had the faintest idea of what the document could be, but when I tried to open it to read I was prompted for a password to open the file.
Password? Password? SHIT!
So I typed in my usual selection of passwords……….. NOTHING
So I typed in every password I have used since 1994……….. NOTHING
This got me determined to read whatever was protected on the document. So I tried everything I could think of that I may have used as a password……….. NOTHING
At this point I decided “Frak This” and downloaded a password cracker, kicked it off on brute force mode and left it run. After a couple of weeks of running 24/7 it had reached the maximum digit number it could get too with no luck. Shit I must use good passwords when I’m in the right frame of mind.
At this point I gave up, Until I would re-find the document and try a different password cracker that guaranteed to break the open password on documents, only to leave it running for several weeks only for it to fail AGAIN.
Well I re-found the document two weeks ago, and was about to try yet another password finder when I had an epiphany. It was an old word document written while I was in UNI. so even if it had been updated there was no way it was last saved on anything later than Office 2000. Which means the file itself would only be encrypted with a weak 40-bit encryption. So where as trying to brute-force my actual password would take months if not years of 24/7 constant running, breaking the encryption key itself and simply removing the encryption would take less than a fortnight of testing keys.
Sometimes thinking outside the box is the way forward. I now have an unencrypted copy of the document thanks to a bit of software called GuaWord (and I only needed to use the freeware version, which is why it took 12 days to decrypt)
