Manyprog Zip Password Recovery 1.2

With all the passwords we have to manage every day for different websites, apps, and other protected or restricted accesses, forgetting the passwords we used to protect our many ZIP archives is the order of the day. Manyprog Zip Password Recovery can analyze your ZIP files, detect which of them are protected, and then recover any of those passwords for you in just a few minutes.

I would love to say that Manyprog Zip Password is an excellent tool capable of breaking the protection of any of your ZIP files in no time at all, but that is not possible. Not that it is unable to do it, either – it is just that the trial version gives you just 1 minute to find out. Either the password you’re looking for is so simple and short that the app can break it in less than 60 seconds or you will need to purchase a license to check its efficiency.

What the trial allows you to do is to know more about how the password recovery process works. In a nutshell, the more help you can give the app, the more chances that it finds your password in a measurable amount of time. To help Manyprog Zip Password Recovery you can provide the app with hints about the character set and the dictionary to be used in the search, as well as any other custom variants that you may have used in building the password. As for the character set, Latin characters seem to be the ones supported by default. If you used a different charset, I guess you'll have to enter all possible characters in the "Custom box". You are asked to tell the app if the letters you used were all caps or not if you used spaces, digits, or any other special symbols, as well as any information about the minimum and maximum lengths. The more specific and precise your indications are, the lower the variant count will be, and therefore, the faster the recovery process. If you happen to have a dictionary of possible passwords, you can throw it in to narrow the search even further.

With an average speed of 1000 variants per second, the recovery process is actually pretty fast, though not fast enough to recover the average 8-character password, complete with some capital letters and digits, in less than one minute. The variant count I got for that – once the character set had been reduced to Latin only, with lower and upper case letters, no space and no special symbols – was a 13-digit figure, a number that I don’t think I could read aloud correctly.

Manyprog Zip Password Recovery looks really promising. It is a shame that the app couldn’t prove its claims of performing “an autopsy password” of any ZIP file created using WinRAR, WinZip, 7-Zip, or PKZIP – even when 128- and 256-bit AES encryption algorithms have been used – in less than 60 seconds.