The software has extensive password recovery options for different
Office applications, but I used my Home version just for mangling with
Microsoft Word.
When you open the application, you can chose different types of attacks.
In majority of cases dictionary attack will be just enough. A large
base of Word users uses normal phrases for this kind of passwords. Open a
Word file and the password recovery process will start:
The software is very fast and as you can see from the lower right bottom
of the screenshot below, it tested approx. 17,000 passwords per second.
In its peaks the number was up to seven times bigger.
Two minutes after starting the scan I got a positive response from the
software and it showed that I was one of "those" people that use their
dog's name as a password. Shame on me - the only thing I can say to my
defense is that this Word file did not hold any important information.
While playing with the software I tested it against some different types
of passwords such as random gibberish and birth dates. Of course, the
dictionary was not enough for recovering these passwords, but the brute
force attack came to the rescue and delivered results.
