Introduction

Has there ever been a time where you have forgotten a password to a compressed file? And the fuss that follows? Well, I was recently invited to review a product from the Russian company ElcomSoft , which specialises in password recovery solutions. Their latest product in recovering ZIP, RAR, ACE and ARJ passwords is Advanced Archive Password Recovery (ARCHPR), now in its second version. How does this product perform? Let's find out!


First Impressions

After establishing contact with ElcomSoft, they sent me a serial to activate the full registered version of the program. This is a simple matter of cutting and pasting the serial in, not very complicated at all. Here's a look at the program interface:



I tested an earlier version of ARCHPR a few years ago, and this was rather tricky to use, because it was run from the command prompt. This version features a very slick and easy-to-use interface, and is quite stable as well (no crashes occurred). It quickly occurred to me "maybe crackers could use this to maliciously hack encrypted files?" But after investigating further, this would have to be a rather small problem, as you will see later.