4

I have a Word document that is password protected. Am I wrong in assuming that if I know nothing about the password that it’s basically a waste of time trying to crack it?

I do remember it’s two short words put together.

My problem is I have no idea how to make a list of all those word combinations. I’ve tried using the English dictionary but it seems absurd to try to make a list of all English words, say, of length 5 or shorter, and put them together With shorter words to make a list. For example, "springegg" or "hotone".

schroeder
  • 123,438
  • 55
  • 284
  • 319
Rgh001
  • 51
  • 1

1 Answers1

5

There are approximately 50,000 words in the English language that are 5 characters or less. If you are sure that your password was comprised of two English words that are each 5 characters or less, then that's a space of about 2.5 billion possible passwords (50,000 * 50,000 = 2.5 billion).

Programs like Hashcat and John The Ripper running on a modern desktop or laptop system can crack passwords in much larger spaces within a few days. So, you might be in luck.

You'll need to construct a list of possible passwords to feed to one of the above programs - based on your knowledge that the password is comprised of two English words that are each 5 characters or less. See Need help generating list with crunch for a similar question involving the creation of a similar list. Or, better yet, apply @nobody's suggestion below of using hashcat's combinator attack (ht, nobody).

mti2935
  • 19,868
  • 2
  • 45
  • 64
  • 5
    That's going to be a somewhat large wordlist. Since it is luckily exactly two words, hashcat's [combinator attack](https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=combinator_attack) should work better. – nobody May 13 '22 at 15:06
  • Thanks @nobody. I wasn't aware that hashcat had such an option. That's definitely better than constructing a list. – mti2935 May 13 '22 at 15:07
  • 1
    You could also do it with John's PRINCE mode and force it to use two elements `--prince=words.txt --prince-elem-cnt-min=2 --prince-elem-cnt-max=2` – Gh0stFish May 13 '22 at 15:44
  • Note that there are less than 8k _somewhat common_ words with 5 or fewer characters (going off a dictionary I've got with about 60k words, which includes ones as unusual as "abaft" but not too much more). Starting with those is much more reasonable. – Radvylf Programs May 13 '22 at 23:51
  • Is it possible I can have that list of somewhat common words? – Rgh001 May 15 '22 at 14:12
  • Do you have that list? – Rgh001 May 22 '22 at 13:02
  • @Rgh001 See https://controlc.com/0f8833ac for a list of 7651 words extracted from /usr/share/dict/american-english which 1) are five or less characters in length, 2) do not contain the apostrophe symbol, 3) do not begin with an uppercase letter. – mti2935 May 22 '22 at 15:33