Recovering Lost Passwords

In spite of the huge mass of info available online, I still subscribe to several dead-tree periodicals. While reading the latest issue of PC Magazine, I came across this article on passwords.

While the main focus of this article is how easy it is for people to crack passwords, what intrigued me was the open availability of software to do this. I have no desire to break into files uninvited. What I have long found frustrating is trying to work with clients' QuickBooks data when they have lost or forgotten the passwords they used to set up their data files.

On a number of occasions we had no option but to use Intuit's password stripping service. At $65 for each case, this isn't really that expensive, but it is a hassle to send & retrieve the data files. The biggest limitation of Intuit's service is the fact that they don't actually give you the password. What they do is remove that portion of the file containing the password and send it back. I have already had occasion to have Intuit strip out the password more than once from the same client's file. Knowing what the password was would have allowed us to avoid the duplication.

The PC Mag article tipped me off to a company that makes a program called Passware that comes in variations for dozens of software programs, including Quicken and QuickBooks. At just $45, it's less expensive and much less hassle than Intuit's service. The big bonus is that Passware actually reveals what the password is rather than keeping it a secret as Intuit does.

KMK
- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 2/04/2002 12:41:00 PM Send this post: