How to Recover WinRAR and Zip Passwords

Archiving and compression is a great way to store and prepare files for sending. You can reduce the size of a file, turn a group of files into a single file, and even encrypt and password the contents! Just take a look at this image to see how much it compressed a 28GB text file.

That's 28GB turned into 78MB!

The only set-back can be the dreaded moment that you actually lose an archive password, which I'm sure we all have done. That's why this Null Byte is here to help you solve such a problem.

Here's What You Need

• A locked .zip or .rar file.
• A Linux live CD, or Cygwin, or Linux installation, or a Virtual Machine running Linux.
• An installed copy of rarcrack or fcrackzip.

Download & Install RarCrack/fcrackzip

cmd == command to be entered in a terminal emulator

RarCrack and fcrackzip are the tools we are going to use to crack the archive. I picked both because fcrackzip is faster at cracking .zip files, but RarCrack is better at the others.

1. Download rarcrack or fcrackzip.
2. Open a terminal emulator.
3. cmd: cd Downloads/
4. cmd: tar -zxvf
5. cmd: cd
6. cmd: ./configure
7. cmd: make && sudo make install

Crack an Archive

For the actual task of cracking the archive, I will demonstrate how it is done via a vTutorial. Commands and description are below.

Command

• fcrackzip -b -c a -l 5-6 Desktop/screenshot.zip

Here is another video for using rarcrack:

Command

• rarcrack --type rar ~/Desktop/example.rar

Then just wait for your archives' passwords to be cracked!

Come join the IRC sometime to talk with me one-on-one!

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