Ever run into situation where someone sends you a read-only password protected Word document, but wants you to make changes?
Here's how to crack it if you are using the newer versions of Word:
If you are using office XP or 2003, you can change the view to HTML-Code using Microsoft Script-Editor by pressing the [Alt]+[Shift]+[F11] key combination.
Search for "Password" and you will find somethimg like this:
<w:DocumentProtection>ReadOnly</w:DocumentProtection>
<w:UnprotectPassword>19E8E61E</w:UnprotectPassword>
To remove the protection:
-Just remowe those two lines, and after saving the document , the protection is gone.
To remove the password:
-replace the Password, here "19E8E61E", with "00000000", save the Document and close "Script-Editor".
Alternative you can save your document as .html and use a html-Editor.
Now if I could only figure out how to crack protected Acrobat files.
Note that this does not work for File Open password protected Office files. Office encrypts the files with a 40 bit key for this type of protection. To break that you have to use either a brute force password hacker or a decrypter that tries all possible key combos until it finds the right one.
There's actually a free command line utility, named GuaWord that will decrypt Word documents. Keep in mind that it takes a few days to go through all the combinations to find the right one.
There are also other 3rd party tools to do the same thing that cost from between $30-60 dollars for a single system license.