ElcomSoft. Password recovery.

Elcomsoft, a leader in password recovery, has added Adobe PDF file support to Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery. The program offers administrators a comprehensive solution for recovering passwords to documents and files when employees forget their passwords, or when they deliberately add passwords to documents in an effort to sabotage their companies.

PDF file support is included in the latest version. The program can recover a file's user password, which is required to open and view a password-protected PDF file. The program can also recover the file's owner or master password, which is needed to modify the permissions that allow users to print a file, copy its contents to the clipboard, edit it, or perform similar operations.

If the PDF file's password uses 40-bit encryption, it is guaranteed that Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery can find the lost or missing password, regardless of the password's length or complexity. It is with files that are protected with 128-bit encryption that the program shows its unique strength. PDF passwords can only be recovered using brute force decryption. Because this method takes a very long time, Elcomsoft's Distributed Password Recovery product is the ideal solution.

Before Distributed Password Recovery, the most effective way to recover a lost password was to put the locked file on the fastest machine in the company, and use brute force to attack the password. Distributed Password Recovery lets you coordinate all of the unused computing power of every computer on your LAN or WAN, and use distributed processing to restore the lost password.

Distributed Password Recovery installs "Agents" onto as many computers on the network as the user desires. Each of these Agents uses brute force to try to recover the lost password. The program ensures that these Agents work together, and combine their computing power to find the lost password. The more computing power available, the faster the recovery speed.

Another module of the program, the Console, is designed to manage the Agents. This solution is best for big enterprises with thousands of clients, when employees leave without un-protecting their mission-critical documents.

According to Elcomsoft, the program restores passwords for Word and Excel documents encrypted with 40-bit keys (Office 97/2000 compatible), as well as more recent documents (Office XP/2003) encrypted with CSP. Office 97/2000 documents can also be decrypted by recovery of encryption keys instead of password, and that type of attack gives a guaranteed result regardless of password length and complexity. The program can also handle Personal Information Exchange certificates (PKCS#12) and PGP encryption, including PGP secret key rings (.SKR files), PGP disks (.PGD files), and PGP self-decrypting archives.

Distributed Password Recovery can be easily installed in enterprise networks with thousands of computers and generates little traffic. The Agents work in the background without harming other programs. That is, they use the CPU only when it is in its idle state. An administrator can get a report about the work that is done. When a password is restored or a document is decrypted, the program informs the administrator by e-mail, and starts processing the next task. Using the Console, an administrator can also keep statistics.

The software has a plug-in architecture and can be easily extended to support more document formats and types of encryption. Future releases will support ZIP and RAR archives, Intuit Quicken files, PasswordSafe containers, and more.

Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery v. 1.3 runs under Windows NT4/2000/XP/2003 and requires 6 MB of hard disk space on the server and 3 MB on every client. The program interface may be set to run in English, Russian, German, and Japanese. Prices begin at $599(US) for networks with up to 20 clients/Agents. For more information and a free trial version of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, please visit http://www.elcomsoft.com/edpr.html.