there's one excel question i get asked
more than any other
how do i open a password protected file
when i've forgotten the password
this video is my answer to that question
okay let's be exactly clear on what
we're talking about here
i'm talking about opening a file
that has password protection on the
actual file itself so an encrypted
file that you cannot even open unless
you have the password if you can already
open the spreadsheet and the password is
on the actual sheets themselves or
whatever then i've got another video
that shows you three good ways that you
can
crack those passwords so have a look at
the description the links in there or
probably on screen
right now there's actually lots of
different types of password
that an excel file can have quick
summary then
what we're looking at modify passwords
remove them by saving the file something
else open passwords that's what i'm
going to focus on here
sheet passwords go to my other video if
you want to remove one of those
vba passwords we'll do that here today
workbook passwords i'll show you briefly
at the end
an overview of a technique you can use
to remove that
so kind of got it all covered now right
but few caveats first right
so it is going to take time
and money to do this why is it going to
cost you money because you are
going to either need some software
which you're going to have to buy or
you're going to have to use
an online service which will charge you
to do this how much is this gonna cost
you
right well the answer is it depends
so to open a workbook so i've got
four examples here this one
was made in excel 97
right or 2003. that one
um that's going to cost you less and
take you less time and not only that
don't even need any software to do it
right great stuff you might think
although with the software the software
will do that as well
but yeah you can do that software free
and there's a website i will show you in
a second
then i've got three files with
increasingly complicated passwords
so the password is actually the file
name so
this one is a dictionary attack the
password is actually the word dictionary
this one password is up for excel it's
got capitals
and numbers in it that makes it harder
to crack and then this one is just
something like crazy thing with symbols
lowercase numbers lats etc etc
right okay what you want to know you
want to know how much this is going to
cost don't you right so
the first one then this excel 97 to 2003
i go here so you can use this website
access back link in the description
this will remove any passwords on
spreadsheets and
actually excel document word documents
with the extension xls or
dot doc in the case of a word choose
your file you upload it
you put in the email address so
i did that i've done that earlier
waiting to hear back from them
and what they will do is learn how it
works so
uh you'll receive a screenshot of the
decrypted file
so in other words they're basically
going to get into it
show you what it looks like and then ask
you for some money
how much money are they going to ask you
for well
depends how many you can buy credit
packs all these links are in the
description and just that
full open honesty here these are
affiliate links
so doesn't cost you anything but i will
obviously get something
if you use it so i get a small
commission if you
use it so it's a good way to support the
channel at no cost to you
but anyway how much is going to cost you
right
depends on the tax rate actually in
which country you're in so for me i'm
looking at it from the uk
but i'm showing it in us dollars it's
pretty universal language for most
people
eight us dollars to a one file crack one
file
but you can buy packer five for thirty
dollars
so that's gonna be more like six dollars
each
and then you can also buy a pack of 10
but to be honest all right
um i mean the main advantage of this
method i guess is that
you don't need any software you send it
off they promise 24 hours
they'll send something back within 24
hours
and so i guess that that's beauty but
actually the software i'm going to show
you
for excel is 40 so you know
and this will do the same job so
arguably why not just buy the software
right rather than 10 of these
okay right and then there is an
alternative uh
software as well so this one just cracks
excel files and it just uses your core
processor
that kind of upgrade if you like
software
is this office password recovery i'm
showing the standard license because
it's
the one that's got all the benefits but
you can get corporate licenses and
things like that
this one uses your gpu as well
now that can be very important depending
on how much you know about the password
in fact i would say it's probably
almost critical if you don't know much
about your password because it's going
to massively speed things
up they're sort of saying something in
the region of 10 times
faster if you're using the gpu
all right
[Music]
right let's start cracking some file
open passwords so we'll start off by
trying to use
the excel based software so this is the
uses just your core g uh your core
processor
but it's a lot cheaper so a third of the
price in fact
of the um more advanced software that's
on offer here right
let's open up this software
now i'm going to do my best to do a bit
of a um
decent sort of review here but i'm not
going to go through absolutely
everything about this software because
there's so many different options so
the critical things um that i think that
you probably want to know
is uh what does it work well the answer
is
depends on the amount of time you've got
to spend so
in some and how much you know about the
password
yes it works it's found a few passwords
for me you can see on screen here
it's found a couple of the passwords
i'd say in summary this one here with
the random numbers and letters
and you know a percentage sign and
things like that unless you've got
some clue about that password
i get it you'll see why in a minute um
you you're gonna be you know your great
great great great great great great
grandchildren i'll still be waiting for
that to be cracked
right let's start with an easy one then
the dictionary attack right in it goes
you can see it's already cracked this
one
you can use their attack scenarios so
they've got like various
ones here so this is this one i happen
to know from running it
many a time it's got about 185 million
passwords it tries to use and it just
goes goes through
so it's um presumably based on their
experience of
the kind of passwords people use
when i use that it failed to find the
password
up for excel but it did find password
dictionary now when i set fail to find
the open
for o up for excel password
it ran i ran it overnight for three
nights running um and actually there's
one great thing about the software
actually and that is that
um you can hit this stop button at any
time
and then the play button and it will
just resume from where where you left
off
it gives you the option to so it's kind
of handy because
although it runs in the background and
it's possible to do things like surf the
web or something
what it's definitely not possible to do
is run spreadsheets
crikey i mean it makes your your
spreadsheets run like a total
dog if you've got this one uh trying to
crack passwords in the background you
know
kind of forget it you want to be pausing
it if you want to do any kind of serious
work on your computer and run it
overnight so yeah
effectively free free overnight runs to
go through all 185 million passwords
that it says it was going to try
didn't find it at the end of it so just
bear that in mind it's no
this is not a guarantee that that's
going to work
brute force right so
just show you quickly brute force so
this one you can say which types of
characters you wanna
uh use so if we go up here let's just
clean up the screen a bit right so
all lo all uppercase letters right
and you can set your password lengths
here so let's be bit realistic about
this right
you're not gonna have a one character
long password that's ridiculous
so let's go from four to eight
now look at that straight away just
capital letters
26 years for an
eight a four to eight digit long
password
and even if you know it definitely is
eight
still doesn't make a lot of difference
25 years
200 and roughly 209 billion passwords to
check
um yeah you can see what i say forget it
add in small characters you know up to
like six and a half thousand years
add in some numbers you know like 27 000
years adding your special characters
look at this look craziness right
imagine if you go up to 10 say you want
to go to 10 um
character long passwords can't do it
next big bang
a little comedy value in here right so
how are you going to do this well let's
take off the specials we're still at
some sort of ludicrous amount of years
what do we know about it um
say you think the word password is
somewhere in there
uh you could try sort of um start to it
so
it's definitely password then it's sort
of uh i don't know like
maybe try three digit number after the
password
that's going to take 15 minutes right so
not too bad yeah so that's brute force
attack
uh we then have let's push the supply
button here
uh brute force with extended mask now
this gives you there's an entire i'm not
going to go through this but there's an
entire programming language
where you can sort of set up things to
say
you know whether you want like you know
i want an uppercase character
followed by you know four lowercase
characters and
symbols and stuff like that where you
can really get
quite complex the programming language
incidentally is in the help file so
um you can usage
macro language alert and it tells you
what what these things are i'm not going
to use that but
it's there then what you've also got
a dictionary based attack so hit on next
right
so this is what we're going to use to
find our word dictionary
so we're going to check the word as it
is but you can have sort of some
mutations for example
so you know so as it is
with their what they call their small
english dictionary
gonna take eight seconds right so let's
just try that right
run it okay ran didn't find the password
though
right let's try our dictionary attack
again
this time though medium-sized dictionary
this one one minute 45 seconds
right so let's let that one go and see
how we're going to carry on now one
thing that i do notice about this
software
is it tends to check the passwords in
alphabetical
order it's found it already right so
it's found the password is dictionary
now when it finds a password
you can click on it and it copies it to
the clipboard for you
just kind of handy and then so we will
then kind of
we go in here go to our open so it's
this one dictionary
open it up ask for password
ctrl v to paste click ok
and we're in brilliant right so found
that one
relatively quickly yeah so that was
pretty good
so what about up for excel
right so i'm going to click in that
next right so i've actually done
a previous experiment on this and tried
to run
this default attack for that password
it didn't find it okay so it took
three days overnight didn't find it so i
know that that is not
not gonna work and i think to be
fair to them probably the reason it
doesn't is because the dictionaries
probably don't contain the word
excel i think if that said something
like up for sport or something like that
it probably would find it um because you
can see the types of passwords it
it was checking as it was going along it
sort of as it checks it sort of shows
you
sort of like every other password or
whatever that is checking
or you know one per second that happens
to be looking at and you can tell
you know that it would find that in fact
i did actually think it would find it
but
it didn't so let's show you how to use
the mask then
so we've already said so we know it's
got all those three in
and we know seven characters long right
so let's
uh so from what i know about this
password and i mean i'll write the
password so i don't
know what it is it still says it's going
to take 420 something years to find it
okay
so we're definitely gonna need a mask
right now imagine that
we somehow we know what the first two
characters are
um and we don't know the rest so we'll
do
one two three four five like that still
saying it's going to take 40 days right
it's really not good yeah so let's let's
replace that with a four
15 hours that was a capital e
now down to 15 minutes
actually we've got an extra character
aren't we yeah so we're 15 minutes sorry
there
so you can see as i'm typing it past
right 14 seconds if i've only got two
two characters missing
now the only reason that i think that
might be slightly useful is for
you know i used to have a password
system where
you know these passwords where say you
have to use a different password every
single month like you might have at work
or whatever
so if you're kind of rotating the last
two digits
you have some kind of rotation system
um but you just don't happen to know you
know could it be anywhere from like you
know zero zero to 99 or something or
even a three digit
one on the end um this will work pretty
well
and it will it's guaranteed to find that
um because it's just like running
through every single
thing and also especially if you know
that's just a number
you could take those two after and it's
going to take three seconds
that's just too simple for it that's all
lower case letters actually one minute
six seconds great right let's run that
see what happens so you could say go
you can see it's sort of showing you
some random this isn't every single one
it's trying but yeah they go
up for itself found it
next attack this really difficult one
here right
that's right let's move that over there
um
this extract data by the way i don't
think it's necessary
it doesn't seem to do anything different
now that you could say well let's run a
default attack on it
but i happen to know that at all default
attacks take
three days it's not i mean
i suppose it's worth a try but it's
certainly no guarantee of it finding
the password and this is one we know
it's not
dictionary we'd have to use a brute
force
um we've got to use everything we're
using special characters
um you know we've got no idea what the
length is so we'd have to go like one to
maybe let's do you know you just can't
do it basically
you can't do it never going to work uh
you need to know for a fact
i would say that you've only you're only
looking for
a four-digit password if you if you've
got no idea about the password and you
think it's got special characters in it
best you could hope for is a four digit
one really the moment you go up to five
it's saying it's going to take a year to
find it
and just so it happens this password
starts with an a
so it probably wouldn't take a year it
would take one
you know 126th of a year but that is a
long time that's what two weeks solid
and that's because it starts with an a
and i happen to know it runs through an
alphabetical order
okay now that's all been tried actually
on
the one without the gpu so if we
actually put the same password and this
other software by the way
it works in exactly the same way i chuck
this on
i'm going to use brute force i'm going
to put it to all the same settings here
so this is the sort of speed difference
that you might be looking at if you were
to
invest the additional money in the
office based version rather than the
purely just excel based version
so brute force attack all the same
settings this one
one year and 10 days this one 81 days
so what's that probably five times
faster that sort of order of magnitude
there
uh well in fact you can see the sort of
speed it's suggesting that it's going to
be able to run out
now i still think that's way too long
you know especially as it's only five
digits you know you're not gonna
you're still realistically not gonna be
able to check anything up seven digit
ones
you know long since 21 years you might
still be alive
whether you want to get into the file or
not by then it's a different story isn't
it right
so anyway file open passwords
unfortunately there's no guarantee
you're going to get into these things
but you know if you know a bit about the
password you stand a way
way better chance and if it's dictionary
um you're straight in really links to
all this software is in the description
so have a look if you're interested go
in and have a look but there are
various other things this software can
do but it can
do instantly so let's try it on some
other types of passwords next
[Music]
now even though i've got another video
that shows you how to remove sheet
protection completely for free
and it got three different ways on that
video
this software is actually remarkably
quick so
for 40 us dollars depending on what you
consider your hourly rate
to be you might want to still invest in
this to remove
cheap passwords because it does it
instantly
so fire up the software drag that
this is a sheet protective password i
mean look at the
password i've used here i mean that's a
really really tricky very long
special symbols everything you know it's
the kind of thing that it would say
would take to the next big
bang to actually crack if it was a file
open password
i've dropped it in hit this removal
passwords
right it tells me it's done it hit save
that's it simple as that right want some
proof
here here it is if i try and type
says can't do it it's password protected
right so that's the original close that
open up the one that says it's unlocked
it's unlocked it
doesn't tell you what password is
definitely unlocked though
so that is completely instant
and that's just on the excel version
obviously the office version will do
the same but it's going to cost you more
you know
it probably would do it faster but quick
it was instant anyway
[Music]
other types of things it can remove are
the vba
project password so again let's just
chuck in a really complicated one or the
most complicated one
i've set up and instantly can be removed
instantly remove all the passwords
remove it says it's unlocked save it
let's do some proof again so i'll open
this up
oh f11 for the vba editor
want to password okay that's now open up
sorry the one that says it's unlocked
uh let's just enable that macro there
but
straight in look straight in um here's
the code
you just uh yeah no problem now
that actually is probably worth a bit of
time
investment because those passwords to
crack
you're gonna need software anyway um now
you can do it with a hex editor and you
can get hex editors
for free you know and if i've got
another video on how to do that i'll
put the link below at the time of
recording this i've not yet recorded on
to
break the vba passwords but i definitely
will so have a look in the description
if you want to know how to do that
completely for free but of course this
software will do it
instantly so it might take you like a
quarter of an hour or whatever to do it
via a hex editor so you want to save
yourself a quarter an hour
for 40 dollars or if you need to do it
often as well and of course the great
thing about this
probably shouldn't say it but i will is
that
if you buy some commercial spreadsheets
um
you can go in and have a look at you
know you can use this tool you can go
and it can have a
you know glance around their code you
know maybe pick up a few coding tips see
how things are working
maybe you know kind of edit a few things
you don't like about the code if you're
feeling
super confident all kind of handy or
just you know just copy and paste a bit
of code around
into your own projects of course
somebody's now going to do that on on
the files i sell probably
whatever yeah so
good for that
[Music]
modify this is where you open a file
you've got a read only button or you can
have a password to
open it it can't remove the modify
password doesn't even know it's there so
if i close this
you'll see what i mean so drag that over
there
onto here says it's not password
protected but
all you need to do there is open it read
only like that
and do file save as and when you
whenever you say what you save it as
you just get a copy of the file and you
can modify it to your heart's content so
not really worth cracking
so the final type of passwords in excel
workbook structure protection
strangely this uh
won't remove them if i click on there
well it just tells you that i've got a
password well i can assure you it has
so it's kind of odd go to review here
you can see it's got password
won't let you do it so how are you going
to get around that
well i have a full video on removing
sheet protection
links in the description and the third
method in that will also
remove workbook protection so i go
through the method
in detail in that video but before you
sort of jump over and look at this video
i just need to show you one slight
difference so
what's happening here is you do this for
free it's actually relatively quick
you need to change the file extension
assuming it's an xlsx or an xls
a or m you change the extension to a zip
file
incidentally something i don't say in
the other video that
has come out in the in the sort of
questions is that if you have an
xlsb file it's a binary excel file
you'll need to save it as an xls
x file before you do this because binary
files
you can't use this method turn it into a
zip file
sure you want to change it yes i do if i
just open it with
um the windows explorer for now
just so because everybody's got that
there's a folder called excel
might be other folders than this it's a
very simple file
click on that you'll have
so normally to remove sheet protection
you go into the worksheet
and you see the sheets but actually
i want to go into the workbook
dot xml file i'm gonna open it
right gonna use notepad and
in here if we do a search for the word
protect
you'll see workbook protection there and
leg you need to remove
this code right and
you'll see where it ends ends there now
you can make a note of that put it back
again and things like that and i go
through a lot more detail on exactly how
you go about saving the file and things
like that
but essentially that's what you need to
do to delete that
you need to save all this re-zip it back
up
change it back to an excel file and that
will remove it but
like i say that's a that's just an
overview of how you do it go to the
other video
i'll show you in a lot more detail right
so
the fact that this software doesn't
remove workbook structure protection
doesn't really matter because you can do
it like that and it's
once you're used to it it's actually
pretty simple
[Music]
so that's it full review of accent excel
password recovery and accent
office password recovery software plus
the uh you've got that online
system as well if you've got an older
type of excel file
all links in the description far better
if you know
quite a lot about your password already
in which case
i would recommend it i don't think
you're going to find any software that's
significantly faster than this the fact
that it's got gpu acceleration
is great in my book and the other great
feature
is that you can like pause it at any
time so if you've got something that
thinks it's going to take three days to
crack
and their standard process does take
about three days to crack
um then yeah just run it overnight three
days running
and see how you get on use at
your discretion see you soon
[Music]
you