My Technical Notes

In order to perform the crack / recovery, we are going to use a small utility called xlcrack, xlcrack recovers lost or forgotten passwords from XLS files such as those created by Microsoft Excel. Some newer XLS files are not suitable for password recovery using this software.

Install libgsf-1

kartook@Nilas:~$sudo apt-get install libgsf-1-dev

Download and compile xlcrack

kartook@Nilas:~$wget http://freshmeat.net/urls/1d5772c1c5bea2854e1d04b29f1f772a
kartook@Nilas:~$tar zxvf [...]

If you forget your password for compressed archive (rar, 7z, zip), RarCrack is the solution. RarCrack uses a brute-force algorithm to find correct password. You can specify which characters will be used in password generations.

Preparing your system for installation

Install the following package

kartook@Nilas:~$ aptitude install libxml2-dev build-essential

Download the latest version of rarcrack from here

kartook@Nilas:~$ wgethttp://sourceforge.net/projects/rarcrack/files/rarcrack-0.2/%5BUnnamed%20release%5D/rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2/download

Extract the tarball [...]