.bootstrap - Safe with most medications

From time to time someone sends me password protected Microsoft Excel (xls-files) spreadsheets. Getting xls files is in it self is bothersome, but that’s the way the world of IT is today, but hopefully more and more home and business users discover the OpenOffice productivity suite in the future. But getting password protected xls-files is just incredibly annoying – first of all it tells you that the person that just sent you the spreadsheet doesn’t have a clue on security matters, since protection techniques of that type is of no real use. They are simply too easy to crack, but again – why at all protect a document…

Howto Crack And Get Rid Of The “Password Protection” / “Recover” The Spreadsheet on Ubuntu

In order to perform the crack / recovery, we are going to use a small utility called xlcrack, xlcrack recovers lost or forgotten passwords from XLS files such as those created by Microsoft Excel. Some newer XLS files are not suitable for password recovery using this software.

Install libgsf-1

sudo aptitude install libgsf-1-dev

Download and compile xlcrack

wget http://freshmeat.net/urls/1d5772c1c5bea2854e1d04b29f1f772a
tar zxvf xlcrack-1.2.tar.gz
cd xlcrack-1.2
make

Crack / Recover A Password From a XLS-file

./xlcrack password_protected_spreadsheet.xls
password_protected_spreadsheet.xls: 1234

Related posts:

1. Crack or Recover Read-only Password Protected Word Document
2. Recover (Crack) a password from a Microsoft Access Database (mdb)
3. Crack mdb Password
4. How to hack Windows password with Ophcrack
5. HackerGuide: Crack Password Encrypted Zip-files
6. Howto Recover a Linux Root Password
7. Crack zip password with fcrackzip
8. Crack Windows Password
9. Crack Cisco VPN (hack)
10. Howto Crack Rar, 7z, and zip files in Linux

From time to time someone sends me read-only password protected Microsoft Word (doc-files) documents. Getting word files is in it self is bothersome, but that’s the way the world of IT is today, but hopefully more and more home and business users discover the OpenOffice productivity suite in the future. But getting read-only password protected word files is just incredibly annoying – first of all it tells you that the person that just sent you the document doesn’t have a clue on security matters, since protection techniques of that type is of no real use. They are simply too easy to crack, but again – why at all protect a document…

Howto crack and get rid of the “protection” / “Recover” the document
If you are using Microsoft Office XP or Microsoft Office 2003, you can change the view to HTML-Code using Microsoft Script Editor by pressing the Alt+Shift+F11 keys.

When the document is opened in the Microsoft Script Editor then search for “Password” and you will find something similar to this:
Forms
ReadOnly
FED5E3B6

To remove the document’s form protection:
– remove the line containing Forms and then save the document using Ctrl+s, the form protection should then be gone.

To remove the document’s read-only protection:
– remove the line containing ReadOnly and then save the document using Ctrl+s, the read-only protection should then be gone.

To remove the password:
– remove the line containing the password and then save the document using Ctrl+s.

This blog entry describes this and other techniques to recover password protected office documents and so does this page.

Related posts:

1. Crack or Recover Password Protected Excel Spreadsheet
2. Crack mdb Password
3. Recover (Crack) a password from a Microsoft Access Database (mdb)
4. How to hack Windows password with Ophcrack
5. HackerGuide: Crack Password Encrypted Zip-files
6. Bash shortcuts tips and tricks
7. Crack Windows Password
8. Crack zip password with fcrackzip
9. Howto Recover a Linux Root Password
10. Howto: How to Reset the MySQL Root Password