System: Windows License: Commercial Application: Password Recovery Homepage: http://www.elcomsoft.com/
First off, I would like to congratulate the development team who built this beautiful little devil. Hats off to you guys! The sheer pace at which this application cracks passwords is amazing! I tried cracking many types of Windows files and they were all cracked very quickly!
The test password file I used consisted of many alpha numeric characters and this application completed many of its jobs in less than 3 minutes. This, I might add, is much faster than most of the other software I have tried in the past.
Installation of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery is quick, simple & very user friendly. The GUI interface is appealing and was easy to navigate. In addition, the icons clearly describe all of the program functions which allow you to quickly configure new projects.
For my tests I used the following harware configuration to crack the test files:
One HP Desktop – 1.4 Ghz P4, 256 Mb of ram, 20 Gb Hard Drive.and an IBM Thinkpad R51,- 128 Mb of Ram, 10 Gb Hard Drive.
My results were as follows: The first time I attempted to crack an .xls file on the HP Desktop my power supply fuse blew. I do not know why this happened. It may have been due to some electricity imbalance or power surge. I quickly went over to another HP Desktop I had lying around, with the same configuration and it worked well. I had similar success with the IBM Thinkpad R51.
I then decided to try out Elcomsoft’s distributed password cracking functionality using a peer-to-peer connection and it worked flawlessly. It really is true distributed process software!
Now onto what I feel are the best parts of the software:
It truely is amazing software! A normal user can easily use it to crack forgotten passwords without having any technical skills at all.
The distributed password cracking functionality will be highly appreciated by the serious cracking community as it can save so much time by using every CPU cycle you throw at it.
The GUI interface is very user friendly, looks good and allows you to configure projects easily.
The software is very fast and reliable, (Excel, Word, Adobe.pdf, and Powerpoint) files were all cracked in less than 5 minutes.
I think one of the best features are the ability to send email alerts. The application will send you an alert when it completes a cracking tasks so you don’t have to sit around and watch the screen. It would also have been nice to have the ability to send alerts in SMS format. This way alerts could be sent to your mobile phone when you aren’t at home.
The installation is very easy. You click on the executable...click next>next>next>then finally finish and you are ready to go!
The logs are clear and easily understandable
You can schedule your projects using a scheduling agents so that the software only runs during idle time. You can also set priorities for specific projects..
One additional feature I would like to see in a future release would be the ability to crack the passwords on multiple files at the same time.
Now for the negative aspects of the software. I was not able to sucessfully crack an .ARJ file, which was disapointing. And lastly, when I had to stop or abort a cracking project the application popped up the following alert on the screen, This operation will result in the loss of previously collected information. In my opinion, whenever I resume a previously stopped project, the application should start from where it was stopped and not begin from the beginning again.
Overall this software does its job perfectly! I wouldn’t hesitate reccomending this software to any of my friends.
