ZIP Password Recovery Standard 5.1

ZIP Password Recovery Standard, as the name suggests, is a tool that helps you recover lost passwords for ZIP archives.
It’s a nice program and it has a good looking interface. In order to ease your work, the home page displays a quick user guide. It explains you how to use the program in three simple steps. Firstly, you choose the archive that is password protected. Secondly, you select what type of attack you want to use. The recommended one is the 'Dictionary attack', which allows you to set the maximum password length or to import a dictionary file. You can also find out the password by using the 'Brute-force with Mask Attack' function. You should use this option if you remember some symbols or letters of the password. This type of attack gives you the possibility to inform the application that your password contains small or capital letters, numbers or symbols. The last type of attack is the 'Brute-force Attack', which tries all the possible combinations. The final step consists in clicking start to begin the recovery. In the end, a window pops up and informs you that the password has been successfully recovered.

The demo version displays only the first three characters of a password and the others will be marked as '*****'. But if you use the full version, you won’t encounter this constraint. What I like the most about this program is that I can stop the process and resume it whenever I want. So, if the process takes a lot of time and you can’t wait for it to finish, you can stop it without losing any recovered data. However, the official website of this program claims that this application supports a wide range of encryption algorithms, including the latest AES encryption. But when I tried to use this tool with an archive that was encrypted with the AES-256 method, it just crashed.

In my opinion, this is a good program that is very useful when you forget the password of an important archive. A big advantage is that no matter of the IT knowledge, the user guide makes everyone understand how the tool works. However, it lacks some minor aesthetic options, like a maximize option or the ability to change the theme.