Knowledgebase: Password recovery
I'm running a password recovery program for a long time and there is no success. What I have to do ?
Posted by Andrey Malyshev, Last modified by Andrey Malyshev on 13 May 2014 03:45 PM

Your file is protected by a strong password which cannot be found instantly. Software developers are using strong encryption and hashing algorithms for data protection. In this case we cannot guarantee that the password will be recovered.

You can try to do the following steps to get your password: 

  • Run the Dictionary attack with all possible dictionaries. People usually use dictionary words as passwords. If the program allows to use dictionary mutations - use all of them. 
  • If the program supports Elcomsoft advanced attacks, please read this KB article and try to use all available information about your password.
  • If the Dictionary attack fails you have to try the Brute-Force. If you know some characters of the password, please try "Brute-force with mask". In this attack you also can set your specific character set if you have some assumptions about it. You have to understand that Brute-force attack for long and complicated passwords can take a lot of time. 
If attacks are running very slow, you can speed-up the password recovery process using the GPU acceleration or using multiple computers. Our programs support NVidia and AMD graphic cards. You can try our Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery to build your own password recovery cluster.
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