Password recovery for Word and Excel is not an area that most people think about until their password is lost, and scam artists take advantage of this.  It is all too easy to make some software, advertise it on the web and rake in the money even though the software is ineffective.

Read on to find out more about this scam, and how you can protect yourself against it.

The Word Excel password recovery scam works like this.  Some software is produced and advertised on the web at a low price.  It typically guarantees to recover “any password”.  The victim buys the software, installs it and sets it to work.  What happens?  It may find the password, but this is unlikely.  Most passwords are quite difficult to recover, and are not dictionary words.

Once the password becomes complex, or a mixture of words and numbers, the only solution is to try every possible combination of characters.  Even on a very fast computer, this could take years if the password is more than 6-7 characters long (most are longer than this).  There are literally trillions of combinations that need to be tried.  

For Word and Excel 97 to 2003, the recovery can proceed far more quickly than for Word and Excel 2007 (which uses a slower encryption algorithm).  Make sure that if you are using Office 2007 that the software you select can support this version.

Whilst technically it is correct that the software will find the password, it may take hundreds of years to do so.  This is not of practical value.  The person who bought the software is out of pocket.  The value of the software is not so high that it is worth going through a lot of hassle to recover the money, but it is still a scam.

The best approach to protect yourself is to learn how Word and Excel encryption works, read independent reviews of Word and Excel password recovery software to understand their features, download and check out free trial versions or use a reliable recovery service.  Buying off the web without doing research will only waste your time and money.

Tags: excel password, password software, scam, word password

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Scam Alert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.