I need some urgent help guys. Word doc password protected, any way to bypass it?

TonyTurbo78 · 13 Apr 2018 at 19:47

hi guys.

Wife is in a difficult position, don't need to go into the details, but long story short, has a very important meeting Tuesday, CEO who left yesterday under incredible terms has password protected doc and now is either playing stupid or genuinely forgot what she changed it to. There are dozens of important pages and she's pooping herself, in a bit of a state.

Is there anyway to bypass the word doc password or go about retrieving the info from inside it?

I've been looking online, only way seems to be with certain tools, but I'd rather not have to pay for that and risk god knows what. I've tried some of the old tricks from the past, changing the extensions, converting with adobe, deleting word settings.xml file etc but cant get in. Security looks a bit tighter with Windows 10/Office 2016.

thanks in advance.

TonyTurbo78 · 14 Apr 2018 at 00:05

A

CaptainCrash said:
If it's Word 2007 or later the encryption is effectively unbreakable for all practical purposes, so you'll need a tool which can mount a brute force/dictionary attack and hope that the password is relatively simple.

I had a quick google and found this - I haven't used it myself but the tool costs nothing so it couldn't hurt to try. If you know part of the password it would increase your chances of cracking it before the heat death of the universe...

Thanks but already tried that tool and a bunch of others. They all follow a similar trend...you run the tool, it then tells you because the password found is longer than 3 characters you need to click this link to purchase full product.

TonyTurbo78 · 15 Apr 2018 at 09:33

AHarvey said:
If you'd like to fire it over to me I can have a look for you, it's been a while since I last had to do it but I have a spare hour this evening and could try it for you.

Thanks. Will pop the doc over to you today.

TonyTurbo78 · 15 Apr 2018 at 14:35

@chili Yes tried all those Friday as I said in my OP but thanks for trying. Sadly wont work on Windows 10/Office 2016 as you can't open the file at all. When you double click it after renaming the extension, windows explorer wont open it at all, just comes up with an error message.