RAR or ZIP Password Removal

Dear All,

I have just downloaded a RAR file from the internet, the owner has not put a password on. I need to get the password of ASAP. Does anyone know a quick and easy way to do this without using software which will take years to take off?

Thanks

J Mahone :)

the owner has not put a password on

That does contradict the Subject line.

Was the downloaded file a purchase or free but required registration? Either way one usually gets an E-Mail with the necessary information.

A password on an archive file is a security measure to prevent unauthorized access to it's contents. If there was a quick and easy ways to bypass the password what purpose would it serve?

All I can suggest is to contact the owner of the file. If you are meant to have access he will either provide the password or the file in accessible form. I will not discuss any way of bypassing passwords.

There's no quick and easy way to remove RAR passwords. Also, despite the claims, the various brute force methods only work realistically with 5 chars or less. If the p/w uses upper and lower case letters + 0-9, that's 62 possibles per character.

For 5 char p/w, there's 62^5 or 62*62*62*62*62 = 916,132,832 poss variations

so a 12 character alphanumeric p/w starts to look uncrackable. A bit like the lottery calculation - 6 numbers - 14 million to 1.

That said, sometimes you can just guess. I found myself in this exact predicament the other day, e.g. if the passworded files were

mynewmovie.3DJed.part1.rar
mynewmovie.3DJed.part2.rar

I guessed '3DJed' as the p/w, and I was right. People often use the name of the website. A long shot, but . . .

edit - another method is to google the exact name of the rar file, and see if you can find it on a different site where they tell you the p/w. I hope this isn't getting too close to rule #4.