Tuesday, December 30, 2008

MS Office Passwords and Password Recovery Programs

By Albert Von McZeally Albert Michael McZeally Alvin McZeally Alice McZeally

If you have a computer and are connected to the Internet then your computer is at risk of having files stolen. While most of the files you have may be innocuous, if there is any personal information in them such as birthdays, social insurance numbers or financial data then you will want to make sure this information is protect from prying eyes. The easiest way to do this is to password protect your documents.

By placing a password on your important files you are ensuring that your documents are safe from those who would seek to exploit it, such as identity thieves. If you own a business you will want to do the same for your financial information as well as and documents that contain info about your clients. While you may not think it is important now, if the data should ever get stolen you will be thankful for it.

Now that we have covered how to keep your documents safe, what happens if you lose or forget the passwords? Obviously you dont want to use the same password on every document " if someone ever guessed the password then all of your files would be at risk. At the same time using a different password every time will make it difficult to remember. Odds are at some point in time you are going to lose a password and need to access your files.

Luckily there are programs out there which are designed to help you retrieve your files should you forget the password. These programs, referred to as password recovery software, work in a few different ways to figure out what password you used.

Password recover software use several different methods in order to guess the right password for a file. One of these methods is to go through the dictionary and try every word in it. If you know that you always use a number or symbol in the password you can customize the search to include them.

To start the program will work through the dictionary, combining each word with numbers or symbols if you request. If your password is an actually word, then you should have some luck here. Otherwise the software recovery tool will carry on to the next step, which is to try combinations of letters, numbers and symbols until it finds the right combination. The more complicated your password is, the longer the program will take to find the answer.

If your password is very complex there is a possibility that the software will not be able crack your password. In this case you will need to take the last resort option and have the software disable your password protection entirely. While this is not the best option as it will leave your files vulnerable while you re-protect them, if you cant get into your files by other means and your files are important to you then it has to be done.

Password recover software can be used on many different types of files and even Windows itself, should you forget how to access your computer. Remember that you should only be using password recovery software to access your own files, as using it to open someone elses documents is against the law.

Password protecting your file can be a pain yes but think of the alternative. The next time you are password protecting your MS Office file which include: word, excel, outlook, powerpoint, etc you think if creating a separate secure password protected file to store all your passwords in. This way you can open your files all with the simple use of one password. - 16089

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