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Updated Feb 10, 2023
Version 6.0
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Hello all. I have a notebook that has a section which is password protected and I urgently need it recovered. I remember the password almost, but there seems to be a letter or two I forgot and I would like to retrieve my section.
Tools exist that claim to brute force password protected sections. Since, as the other poster mentioned, this is entirely local to your system, there is no way to prevent such an attack just as there is no way to retrieve the lost password from Microsoft. If you know most of the password except one or two letters, this might be a feasible way to recover your data. I will not link to such tools as they can be used for nefarious purposes and themselves might be malware. USE EXTREME CAUTION if you decide to use such a tool, especially if you do not have a strong anti-malware/EDR system in place. I should also note that if you don't actually know any part of the password, it could take dozens to thousands of years to successfully decrypt the password using brute force if the password is strong.
An aside to this, if anybody wants to ensure their password-protected notebooks actually are secure, you need to use a very long and complex password to make brute force infeasible and potentially future-proof later attack attempts, at least until quantum computers makes such attacks trivial.