Document Passwords

CoXeY · 21 Apr 2006 at 10:03

We have a number of sensitive documents stored on a our file server that are protected with a combination of NTFS permissions and document passwords (Using Word and Excel).

How secure are the passwords within Word and Excel? Just wondered what techniques you guys used to secure highly sensive documents...

Cheers
Dan.

CoXeY · 25 Apr 2006 at 13:40

Bump...

Otacon · 25 Apr 2006 at 14:24

CoXeY said:
Just wondered what techniques you guys used to secure highly sensive documents...

File encryption, though it adds a lot of extra considerations from a disaster recovery point of view.

Document passwords are very easily cracked I'm afraid.

Pyrosoft · 25 Apr 2006 at 14:27

Word and Excel I dont know, but I do know that with Access it is just a matter of running a .exe and selecting the .mdb file you want the password of it, then it pops up, no password cracking needed as such, it just appears. I imagine there is the same sort of protection for all Office applications so Word and Excel should be just as easy.

One idea would be to zip the documents up, although still crackable, it takes muck more effort to crack a zip password.
It is a lot of hassle to do that though mind you.

The_KiD · 25 Apr 2006 at 14:37

In my experience if the password is over 6 chars long and is not just a number or some letters and is in fact a combination, then they are very hard to crack.

We have an excel spreadsheet here that is password protected and we ran a pass cracker on it, but cancelled it after 2 weeks, it's ETA was about 6 months to run through all the possible combinations.