Recover password of password protected zip file

In this article, we will get to know about how to get the password of a zip file. I’m using Linux I went with a quick search and came across fcrackzip. This is a free program that allows for both dictionary and brute force cracking of zip file passwords. It is not difficult to use and offers a wide range of options. 
Let’s make a zip file then we will copy-paste it into Linux after that we will try to break this password by fcrackzip. I created a zip file. This zip file’s password is 12345678.

Creating password protected secret.zip

In Terminal type fcrackzip –help this command will open help options for fcrackzip 

USAGE: fcrackzip
          [-b|--brute-force]            use brute force algorithm
          [-D|--dictionary]             use a dictionary
          [-B|--benchmark]              execute a small benchmark
          [-c|--charset characterset]   use characters from charset
          [-h|--help]                   show this message
          [--version]                   show the version of this program
          [-V|--validate]               sanity-check the algorithm
          [-v|--verbose]                be more verbose
          [-p|--init-password string]   use string as initial password/file
          [-l|--length min-max]         check password with length min to max
          [-u|--use-unzip]              use unzip to weed out wrong passwords
          [-m|--method num]             use method number "num" (see below
          [-2|--modulo r/m]             only calculate 1/m of the password
          file...                    the zipfiles to crack

There are 2 methods to get the password of the zip file

1. Brute force attack: If you wanted to use a brute force attack from 4-8 characters on “secret.zip” you would use the following command: 

$fcrackzip -v -m -l 4-8 -u secret.zip

To break the command down: 

• v is for verbose and gives you better output
• m specifies the mode to use, in this case, zip6
• l specifies the minimum password length to maximum password length
• u tells the program to test the password with unzip before declaring it correct

2. Dictionary-based Attack: Using a dictionary-based attack is as easy as brute force attack

Syntax:

$ fcrackzip -v -D -u -p /usr/share/dict/words secret.zip

Here: /usr/share/dict/words is the wordlists and secret.zip is the zipped file that is encrypted.

Example:

fcrackzip -v -D -u -p /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt 16162020_backup.zip

Here the only difference is the -D to specify a dictionary-based attack and -p which is used to specify the password file. This file should contain one word per line and on Linux systems, there’s a nice dictionary included in /usr/share/dict/words or you can use any other password dictionaries.