It was actually a very long time ago when a friend of mine contacted me about a Word Perfect data file. It seemed that one of his employees had decided to pick up and leave the company without any notice.
Nothing was stolen, broken or sabotaged but there was a rather interesting file in the document directory that was password protected. The internet was not quite as advanced then as it is today. I did manage to find a company selling software that could crack the password but as the file was named resume, and she had left for a new job they didn’t really want to spend the money for this single use.
If that same event occurred today it is pretty likely that we would not be barred from viewing the file.
I did a quick check and there are a lot of people on the internet with hints/videos/software to remove form protection from Microsoft Word, sheet protection from Microsoft Excel, and passwords Adobe PDF’s just to name a few. I would have thought that it would have been limited to file based data such as various office documents but the list also supported more versions of the Windows operating systems and even email packages.
If you don’t have physical control over your data, then you don’t control it at all. I didn’t have the budget to purchase some of these software packages to test out their claims but I did decide to take a chance on some of the free packages that were readily available for removing passwords from some of my documents.
The only reason that I ended up dealing with password protected documents is because I just received one. It wasn’t that password protected documents was such a stimulating topic but because the password for the document I needed didn’t work. The colleague that sent this to me was on vacation by the time I tried to access it.
Rather than finding and speaking with her coworkers as well as convincing them that I did need this info, I simply downloaded a free program of my own. Within 10 minutes from start to finish I was able to access the contents of the document.
Rather than to over simplify the task for everyone else, I will let you find your own methods for circumventing password security on your data files. I will simply list one of the companies which has a commercial product that does seem support removal for different software packages and operating systems.
Password removal software
http://www.openwall.com/passwords/
