Quizzes & Puzzles7 mins ago
oops! Winzip passwords
7 Answers
I have forgotten my password to a winzip folder with a lot of important work in it. I have to have it in winzip to carry it around. Is there any way around the password system?
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.That depends - you can brute force crack the Zip file easily and if you're someone who chooses easy passwords (like a word, or a word with some numbers thrown in) then it won't take long. If, on the other hand, you're someone who understands computer security and you use complex passwords, it'll take much longer...
Try using a Password Recovery program, such as http://www.zipcure.com/index.html.
This is shareware, and it uses the "brute force" mthod that Lisaj mentioned.
Sorry - I shouldn't have put a fullstop after the URL. Try again http://www.zipcure.com/index.html
well, brute forcing depends on how the system that is locked works. With ZIP files, they're encrpyted in a very particular and known way, so it's highly likely that the process can be reduced using some known weaknesses. For example, if you knew that the system you were trying to break held MD5 hashes of the passwords, you could try breaking it with lists of known hashes rather than creating hashes on the fly: this is because string comparisons are far more efficient than hash generations. You get the idea anyway.... Oh, and there are 94 characters combinations... so it'd be 94^11, not 200^11(lowercase+uppercase+numeral+grammar).
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