Password Cracking Office 2010 documents

[RobFuller]

Can anyone recommend a password cracking tool for Office 2010 documents, explicitly PowerPoint and Excel. A student who left decided it would be a smart idea to lock his files, however now we need to get into his files for external moderation but we don't know the password. We phoned the student in question but he has forgotten...!

Any suggestions welcomed!!

TIA,
Rob

[Arthur]

I had to remove a password from a Word document last week and Elcomsoft's Advanced Office Password Recovery worked brilliantly. It found the password in a few seconds.

[Steve21]

Any suggestions welcomed!!

TIA,
Rob

Does laugh at the student that will lose his marks count as suggestion?

But a lot of the passwords if locked for certain things can be bypassed by opening the files as zips. Often you can get the passwords in plain text then.

think it only works on lock or edit though, one of them it doesnt

Steve

[RobFuller]

Great, the files are 128bit encrypted!! Running Elcomsoft's Advanced Office Password Recovery on an AMD GPU at the moment, 47k passwords a second, lets hope one works!!

[Arthur]

Great, the files are 128bit encrypted!!

Mine were in Word 2003 format, which I think is a lot easier to crack.

47k passwords a second

Is it still going?

[SYNACK]

Yea Office 2003 passwords were completely trivial compaed to the newer formats, it may take quite a bit of chewing on the document to get it out again.

[RobFuller]

No luck, its hit the trial limit. Depends if the school wants to invest in the software to continue with the brute force approach but that could take sometime with no guarantees! Thanks for the suggestions guys!

[bandgeekmafia78]

Long shot, but do you have an archived backup of the student's documents before they were password protected?

[Arthur]

that could take sometime with no guarantees!

You may want to take a look at Advanced Office Password Breaker for guaranteed password recovery. It is a bit more expensive though.

[RobFuller]

Long shot, but do you have an archived backup of the student's documents before they were password protected?

I took a look with the teacher but we couldn't find anything without the password on it, looks like he done the work and passworded all in the same lesson! I think the lad is re-doing the work, that will teach him hopefully!

[X-13]

I think the lad is re-doing the work, that will teach him hopefully!

What sort of work is it?

Generic work or coursework?


If it's coursework, and it's past the date it needs to be in, I would be tempted to class it as "not done".