Hacking a password protected zip file can be done with many password cracker utilities available online. However, if you are a Kali Linux user, password cracking becomes that much more easy with an open-source tool called fcrackzip. Fcrackzip is a fast password cracker partly written in assembler and available for Kali Linux. It is able to crack password-protected zip files with brute force or dictionary-based attacks allowing you to unzip files even with most hard passwords. Go to Application> Kali Linux> Password Attacks> Offline Attacks> fcrackzip Open Terminal type fcrackzip –help. This command will open fcrackzip with help options Ex – fcrackzip –u –c 1 –p aaaaaaaa ‘/root/Desktop/Test.zip’ Here, The –u option, Try to decompress the first file by calling unzip with the guessed password. This weeds out false positives when not enough files have been given. The –c option lets you select the character set, ‘1’ here means password also be numeric. The -p option lets you select an initial string to start brute-force attack. Note – as you can see the ‘aaaaaaaa’, if you will count this is total 8 digits for your password to be in 8 digits Ex – fcrackzip –u –c 1 –l 4-8 ‘/root/Desktop/Test.zip’ In this example, the Zip file has small (lower case) alphabet digits as a password. Here password is ‘abcdefgh’. If your password has small alphabets characters and length of the password is 8 digits. Ex – fcrackzip –u –c a –p aaaaaaaa ‘/root/Desktop/Test1.zip’ Here we are using ‘a’ after –c because our password has small (lower case) alphabet. If you have doubt that the password has a upper case alphabet than replace ‘a’ with capital ‘A’. If you think that your password has both upper and lower case than you can write ‘Aa’. Just like this if you doubt your password has lower case (a), Upper case (A), numeric (1). You have to write there ‘Aa1’. Ex – fcrackzip –u –D –p ‘/root/Desktop/dic’ ‘/root/Desktop/Test.zip So finally we have an all-encompassing command for cracking the password-protected file which should look like this >
