Excel changed my own password!!

  • Thread starter Thread starter TPD
  • Start date Start date
T

TPD

This very strange occurance happened to me just last week and a
co-worker the other day. If someone has had experience with htis or has
an idea what the underlying cause is, I would truly be appreciative of
their expertise in this matter.

I created an Excel spreadsheet about 1 year ago and have continued to
make updates to it every month. As always, I password protect the
document as I'm the sole owner of this form within our huge
corporation. I have never lost sight of the file from my drive and only
protected copies get distributed. Just last week when making an update
to the form, I could not unlock it with my password. I tried several
times with many variations figuring I was having an Aspartame moment of
memory loss.

As it turned out, I downloaded a password cracker trial application
that promptly and easily found the password to unlock it. It was some
funky decrypted text and numbers about 9 characters long. I didn't
think this could be correct, but I tried it anyway and sure enough it
unlocked it!!!! How can this happen? How could the password change on
its own?

I resaved it again with my old standby password and re-opened it and it
seems to be fine again retaining the correct password.

Dismissing it as a fluke, I received a call from a co-worker just the
other day in a complete panic because a form that he created also
locked him out of his own file! I promptly used the password cracker
app and sure enough it detected a password (not decrypted) that made no
sense to the guy, but it did unlock the protection. What's going on? No
viruses appear in virus checks.

I'm running an XP Operating System and Office XP.

He is not,...he is running 2K.

Any help would help.
 
TPD said:
This very strange occurance happened to me just last week and a
co-worker the other day. If someone has had experience with htis or has
an idea what the underlying cause is, I would truly be appreciative of
their expertise in this matter.

I created an Excel spreadsheet about 1 year ago and have continued to
make updates to it every month. As always, I password protect the
document as I'm the sole owner of this form within our huge
corporation. I have never lost sight of the file from my drive and only
protected copies get distributed. Just last week when making an update
to the form, I could not unlock it with my password. I tried several
times with many variations figuring I was having an Aspartame moment of
memory loss.

As it turned out, I downloaded a password cracker trial application
that promptly and easily found the password to unlock it. It was some
funky decrypted text and numbers about 9 characters long. I didn't
think this could be correct, but I tried it anyway and sure enough it
unlocked it!!!! How can this happen? How could the password change on
its own?
Click to expand...

If you check the new password with your password cracker, you'll find
that it is another string of letters and numbers. Am I right?

Don't worry, this is normal, but I can't explain why for security
reasons. Some viruses can make changes to Excel passwords, but such
problems are rare.

If you want to try another password finder to test this, there are
some free tools available here:

http://www.intertek.org.uk

Let me know the results!
 
The link for the free apps did not work. I'll try it again later.

The other links for the articles did.

Thanks.

t
 
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