litsupport summary for the week ending on 08/23/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. Advice on dealing with passwords for Excel (and other) files?
A.

• Office Password Recovery Pro;
• Passware Kit Enterprise;
• (a) using known passwords that are used elsewhere, (b) dictionary attack derived from the PC of the user,(c) tools such as Passware for brute-force and hybrid attacks (d) rainbow tables are available for Windows, not sure for Excel;
• In early versions of Office the password was actually retrievable directly from the file if you knew where to look in a hex dump of the file, see more here;
• Ask the client up front what they would like to do with password protected files.
  

Q. Conversion Utility to create PST files from NSF files?
A.

• dtSearch provides a list of resources;
• Paraben's Network E-mail Examiner (NEMX);
• Beware of metadata loss;
• See prior discussion here.
  

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.