AccessBack, Get My Excel Password Back!

Almost at the same time, AccessBack.com received the very same question from opposite corners of the world:

“If I pay you to decrypt my Excel file, will you send me the password to the document?”

The answer is already in the FAQ section of the site, and it's short and to the point:

“No, we won't!”

It's not that we're being difficult and holding your Excel password back. The reason is different: we don't need the password to decrypt an Excel (or Word) document, so we never look for it — which means we don't know it.

The upshot: you get your decrypted document, but you don't get the password.

Here's How It All Works…

Data is encrypted not with the password itself but with an encryption key (that's true everywhere, not just in Microsoft Office). The key is derived from the password by various algorithms, and it can be of different lengths — the longer the key, the stronger it is.

Excel (and Word) 97-2003 encryption uses a very short key by default — just 40 bits.

A key that short lets us precompute rainbow tables covering almost the entire keyspace. Which is exactly what we did at Passcovery…

So now we simply take our own rainbow tables, scan them for the encryption key we need, and use it to decrypt the Excel (or Word) file the service received. The whole thing takes AccessBack.com a couple of minutes, and the result is guaranteed every time.

And the password stays unknown. To decrypt Excel (and Word), you simply don't need it!

See for yourself — decrypt your Excel (or Word) document at AccessBack.com. It's free!

Decrypting a Password-Protected Excel File in Action

You can see a live example of how this works in the Passcovery Suite video. The full license includes a set of rainbow tables from Passcovery: