If I never see another password again, it won't be too soon. I mean, why can't we all just be nice to each other and not steal? Why can't everybody just leave everybody else's stuff alone? I wish I had just one password. I am an idiot for thinking about this. If I express this sort of thing in mixed company, everyone will think I'm a complete goof. So security concerns make us do all sorts of things these days, including eliminating the word "trust" from our vocabularies in order to better address the harsh realities we deal with in business. That is to say people steal, ergo, files need to be protected. You produce valuable work ensconced in Word, Excel, WordPerfect, etc., etc., etc., and if it's left unprotected, the wrong people may find and use it for their own purposes. That's bad. The problem is, the words "password protected" do not automatically mean "password remembered".

Passware has been around since 1998, producing password recovery software. The company deals mainly with Help Desk personnel, law enforcement, forensic agencies, IT professionals, network administrators and a wide range of non-business software consumers. The Lost Password Recovery Kit (LPRK) is a comprehensive set of keys (document modules) each of which is designed to analyze password protected files from over 80 widely used (and a few not-so-widely used) productivity programs. Each key/module is designed specifically to analyze and recover passwords from documents generated by a particular program. Load the Word Key to recover a Password from any Microsoft Word document; load the 1-2-3 Key to recover a password from any Lotus 1-2-3 file, and so on.

Installing and using LPRK is very simple. The installation itself is benign—no background processes, no system problems. The main reason is that LPRK doesn't do anything until you actual launch the software and feed it a file from which a password has to be recovered. Can't open a password protected Excel document because you fired the person who created it (and he didn't leave you a Post-It with the password)? No problem. Launch the LPRK Excel Key, point it to the offending Excel file and let the software perform its magic.

In most situations, LPRK will recover the password in a few seconds or minutes. Mind you, long and overly complex random passwords may keep LPRK churning away for very long periods of time—days in some cases—so smart IT people (or anyone who is using LPRK) may be wise to reduce the process priority of the software if the machine on which LPRK is running has to be used for other work. Note also that documents locked with passwords that have been heavily encrypted will stump the chump. Aside from that caveat, if there's an LPRK key for your particular document, the password will likely be recovered.

I tried 60 different password protected documents in LPRK. The passwords ranged in complexity from simple (polly) to complex (Raid34Tx). LPRK took an average of 45 seconds to recover each password. The simplest ones were recovered in less than 5 seconds. While there are never any absolute guarantees with this sort of software, I could not stump the program.

Smart enterprise IT managers, smart home-office and small business owners should recognize that the LPRK search routine is highly customizable. So if you design and impose a password system in your business using a specific formatting (e.g., capital, lowercase, number, number, number, number), adjusting the LPRK search formatting accordingly thereafter will help recover lost passwords quite easily. Ensuring that all staff are trained to use a particular password formatting can often make the password easier (read: faster) for LPRK to recover. Limiting LPRK's work to six letters/digits in such a situation, for example, makes password recovery a breeze, while still preserving sufficient complexity to prevent plain language or other guess-able passwords from being used. While there are always going to be people who have trouble either counting to six or following this kind of rule, I think that enforcing password rules for your business is usually a good idea.