WinZip password recovery help

R

Rusky

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 4, 2005
Messages
380
I have a zip file that I put a password on, but I forgot the password. Is there any way to find the password?
 
Not in any practical manner. There are brute forcers out there that will try to brture force the password using every sequence of letters number, and what not, but that could take months to years depending on how long the password was and how fat your computer is.

I've never been able to crack a ZIP file password, but then again I don't try that often.
 
ryan_975 said:
Not in any practical manner. There are brute forcers out there that will try to brture force the password using every sequence of letters number, and what not, but that could take months to years depending on how long the password was and how fat your computer is.

I've never been able to crack a ZIP file password, but then again I don't try that often.
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LOL...

yeah and we usually don't talk about these things around here but one way = brute force...
 
I have previously brute forced a zip password on one of my zips, it took a couple of hours, maybe a day or two in the Pentium days. It was a small zip and I had an idea of how long the pwd was going to be and what type of symbols I used. Nobody on here will be able to point you as to where to find the software you need though. Rules are rules.
 
I know exaclt the software he needs. Is it still against the rules to PM the info to somone? even just the name of hte software so they can hunt it themselves? (just so people know, I'm not a hacker, I'm a network admin and I reoutinely have to find passwords for people... my most recent being "password" *mutters about idiot users*
 
this thread got me curious and after doing my own research I found that it is much too easy to "recover" a "forgotten" zip password.. if the data in the zip is very sensitive people should use 16+ character pw's.. pain in the butt but short passwords are so insecure, at best it will just keep the uninformed standard pc user from getting access
 
Techx said:
at best it will just keep the uninformed standard pc user from getting access
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For the majority of uses, that's good enough. For everything else, there's PGP.
 
IanG said:
For the majority of uses, that's good enough. For everything else, there's PGP.
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I am familiar with what PGP is but how would that be used on something like a zip file?
 
ryan_975 said:
Encrypt the file after it's zipped up???
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Yup. You could encrypt the file before zipping it, but it probably wouldn't compress very well.
 
IanG said:
Yup. You could encrypt the file before zipping it, but it probably wouldn't compress very well.
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I recall hearing something about how encryption algorithms try to make the data appear to have a uniform entropy, hence compression is unlikely to work well.
 
Most compression works by looking for repeated patterns which can be represented using an algorithm. Quick example would be a text file containing the letter z repeated 1 million times. A compression system would have a way to say 'repeat z 1 million times' or maybe 'repeat zzzz 250,000 times.'

Encryption pretty much destroys any repeated patterns in the file, so the 1 million z example will now be one million random characters.
 
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