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Administrators, as well as a lot of developers, will readily tell you that one of the most frustrating aspects of their job revolves around the ongoing management of passwords. Tony Stevenson feels the pain for us.

ElcomSoft, a company that deals in Windows productivity and utility applications, claims on its web site that “password hacking is one of the most critical and commonly exploited network security threats”.

It is also reported on the ElcomSoft site that “password-protecting confidential documents for businesses and end users alike, is becoming an ever more important part of day-to-day life. There will come a time when an important password-protected document(s) or file(s) will be lost or maliciously changed. Without a means of retrieving the contents of the document(s) or file(s), this can be at best inconvenient and at worst very costly”.

So what’s a practical solution to these types of problems?

It could, in fact, be of one of ElcomSoft’s own password retrieval and system utility products called “Proactive Password Auditor”. It is a password auditing and retrieval program that is suitable for running on a number of Windows platforms including NT, 2K, XP and Server 2003.

The purpose of the software is to tighten up system security by assisting IT personnel to firstly locate threats and then secondly, to eliminate those threats. Proactive Password Auditor can be successfully deployed within an organisation in a number of different ways.

For instance, network security can be strengthened as a result of Proactive Password Auditor’s capability to conduct an audit of account passwords. The output from such an audit is the details of those passwords that are now considered to be “unsafe” for continued use. In addition, Proactive Password Auditor is a handy utility for Windows administrators who can rely on it to recover lost passwords and access users’ accounts.

Comprehensive details of how the program actually works are contained in the online documentation that is supplied. That’s where, for instance, you can read about how it supports a variety of methods for obtaining password hashes.

As well as Proactive Password Auditor, ElcomSoft also offers other password recovery software too that can be used to recover passwords for the files that have been created in most of today’s popular applications. Examples of those applications include Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, PowerPoint), Internet Explorer, Lotus SmartSuite, Adobe Acrobat (PDF), Intuit Quicken and so on.

Elcomsoft’s “Password Recovery Bundle”, which is targeted towards corporate and government customers, is promoted as being an “all-in-one password recovery, system and security solution”.

Having ready access to password recovery technology is essential for those occasions when legitimate users forget their passwords, or when an employee sets up password protected files but then subsequently resigns from the company without ever revealing the passwords to other staff members. Full details of this type of software are provided on the ElcomSoft site and while visiting there, I recommend that you also subscribe to the company’s “Password Recovery Software” email newsletter.