SUMMARY: How many times have you decided that you just needed to protect some of your work with a password... and then forgot it? If you're like many, then this is something that can happen from time to time. Jon "Albinus" Albiez takes a look at the Advanced Archive Password Recovery program to see if it has what it takes to help us in our moment of need.
The program interface is split into several tabbed areas, each of which defines the variables desired when recovering passwords. Let's step through each of them:
The range tab specifies the type of characters you wish to scan for in the password. For example, if you remember that the password had only lowercase letters, then you would only check the box labelled "All Small Latin". On the other hand, if you had forgotten what the password contained, then you could select "All Printable". Be warned though - this increases the time needed to recover passwords exponentially!
You can also specify where to start trying to recover the password. For instance, if you knew that the password began with the character string "Fa7d", then you could type that in the "Start from" box. The "End at" box works the same way, if you knew that the password was before "Fa7dzzzz", type that in.
The Length tab is quite straightforward. You simply specify how many characters the password contains. For example, you could select between 1 and 8 (as shown above). Not much here at all, is there?
This is where the malicious hackers could have a ball. Due to human beings (in general) not being able to remember cryptic codes too well, we unfortunately choose common words as the password. Cities, People's names, pet's names etc are all commonly used. ARCHPR comes with a dictionary attack, and you can even specify your own dictionary if you wish. The program also comes with clever options such as "Smart mutations", which is a dictionary word that could have one letter spelt incorrectly. And once again, you can choose where you would like the dictionary scan to begin in the list.
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