ElcomSoft Co.Ltd. has released Advanced Office Password Breaker (AOPB) v. 2.0, an application that makes it easy to gain access to Microsoft Word password-protected documents that have been accidentally or purposefully password protected. The software is used by information technology support administrators, business managers, and law enforcement officials to protect their organizations from the perils of losing access to critical documents.

In addition to the brute-force, dictionary attack, and key recovery techniques used throughout ElcomSoft's password recovery applications, Advanced Office Password Breaker uses the company's "rainbow attack" subsystem. The enterprise version of AOPB is shipped with a DVD that contains special pre-computed hash tables that will allow you to decrypt an estimated 99.5 percent of Word documents in just minutes instead of days, even on slow computers. By pre-computing these hash tables, and providing them on a DVD or a 4-Gigabyte thumb drive, AOPB makes short work of password-protected Word documents that use 40-bit encryption.

The vast majority of Word documents can be opened in minutes, because most of them use 40-bit encryption. In Office 97 and Office 2000, 40-bit encryption was the strongest available. While Office XP and Office 2003 offer stronger encryption regimens, few people use them. By using the older 40-bit encryption, business people maintain compatibility across all versions of Word, as well as compatibility with many software products that import Word documents. The default setting in Office XP and 2003 is 40-bit encryption, and most people leave that setting intact.

For more information, visit AOPB home page. A trial version is available, without charge. AOPB v. 2.0 runs under Windows 2000/XP/Vista/2003/2008.