Decrypting old MS Word docs

[James Gray]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005 03:32 pm, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> I found a pile of old MS Word documents -- probably from the
> 2.0 or 6.0 era -- that I wrote a long time ago, encrypted,
> and promptly forgot the password to. Now I'd like to decrypt
> them. Lots of googling only found me a lot of non-beerfree
> tools, and it seems pretty silly to pay for such a thing. Is
> there a free-software tool to handle cracking MS Word
> passwords? Barring that, is the format of MS Word encryption
> laid out anywhere? If so, I'm sure it's easy to write a
> little tool myself to do what I need.

Not sure if this will work with your documents but I've tested it here on some 
old-ish word docs successfully:

http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/archive/bugtraq/2004/01/msg00010.html

Cheers,

James
-- 
Whether you can hear it or not,
The Universe is laughing behind your back.
  -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"