A closer look at Elcomsoft Advanced Office Password Breaker 3 Enterprise Edition

Elcomsoft Advanced Office Password Breaker breaks passwords and unlocks password-protected MS Word documents and Excel spreadsheets instead of attacking and recovering complex passwords. The Enterprise edition comes with Thunder and Rainbow tables for unlocking the documents. It works by attacking the low-level 40-bit encryption key instead of attempting to guess variable-length alphanumerical passwords.

Welcome screen:

By clicking on the Open button, you choose the document you want to unlock – a Word document in this case – and the process starts immediately:

As you may notice, the estimated time on just one processor is very long (going on days, even). You can use multiple processors and cores to speed up the process.

You can stop the process any time, and save the status file (.bsf) so you can restart from the place you stopped before by just starting the file.

Another way to speed up the process is by using a rainbow attack, i.e. pre-computed tables for documents. You can choose to do so in the option tab, and change other options, too:

Starting it, you get the notification that the rainbow attack is in progress:

The end result – notice the total time it took:

You can save the statistics for future reference, and you can finally decrypt the file and save it – file successfully decrypted:

The process is identical for Excel spreadsheets, the only difference being in the tables used.

Advanced Office Password Breaker is a handy tool that will make your life easier. It does not recover the original passwords, it just removes them. It’s fast and effective, and a real asset in offices. It supports MS Office Word and Excel 97 and 2000 and supports Office 97/2000 compatible documents saved with MS Office XP and 2003.