Cracking password protected MS Office files using Hashcat
Part of the series (2 of 2) cracking password protected MS Office files. Whether it is a forensic investigation or even in private life, we might need to open a password protected file which might contain a personal information or information that can change the direction of investigation. For those files, unlike common belief, depending on the length of password, it is actually possible to crack the file reach the data inside. But in order to that, we must have the correct tools and right approach. In this article, I am going to show how to crack a password protected MS office file using Hashcat on Linux Ubuntu OS step by step. Extracting password hash from the file In our case, we are going to have example.xlsx file which is protected with password. The first thing to do here is to extract the hash of the password which can be done using John The Ripper. This step is explained in my previous article, which can be found here . Note that we are going to need the text file that is...