How secure is password protecting Excel docs ?
How secure is password protecting Excel docs ?
I have an Excel file on my laptop thats got a lot of important info on it & its protected by a password.
If the laptop gets stolen how safe is that file? Is the password easy to bypass if you know what you are doing ?
Cheers.
If the laptop gets stolen how safe is that file? Is the password easy to bypass if you know what you are doing ?
Cheers.
Scooby Regular
Joined: Mar 2003
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If its an older excel then you can get free password crackers online which will do it instantly.
Scooby Regular
Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 2,654
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Interlore do various office password hackers for around $30, as i said they can only work on brute force for 2003 files and they claim to be able to check 5.5million combinations per minute so try make your password as long as possible.
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From: Cheshire
Also make sure you use at least one letter, one number and one other character (better with at least two and in different case), as that means any brute force attack has to use all three character sets making the possible combinations much much bigger.
i.e.
S©o0byN3t
i.e.
S©o0byN3t
Scooby Regular
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From: High Wycombe
Any password can be broken. All it takes is time and CPU power.
It took someone 3 weeks to break the payroll password on excel.
That was using 3 multi-core boxes using a distributed brute force attack.
Password was strong (like S©o0byN3t) but only 7 chars long. If it were 8 chars long it would not be worth it.
It took someone 3 weeks to break the payroll password on excel.
That was using 3 multi-core boxes using a distributed brute force attack.
Password was strong (like S©o0byN3t) but only 7 chars long. If it were 8 chars long it would not be worth it.
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The primary defense against a brute force attack must be enforcement of a strong password policy. As mentioned earlier, dictionary words make poor passwords. Password size is also important: the longer the password, the more difficult it will be to force. While there is no strict definition of a strong password that will be harder to determine via a dictionary attack, some good guidelines would be:
- Minimum length of at least seven characters
- Must include both upper and lower case characters
- Must include numeric characters
- Must include punctuation
These guidelines may seem overly strict, but there is little chance that a password created with these restrictions will be found with a brute force attack. There are almost 70 trillion combinations of characters that can be seven digits long and can include upper case characters, lower case characters, numbers, and punctuation. Even a dictionary attack tool that could make one hundred requests per second would still take over 11,000 years before it would be statistically likely to guess the password.
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