When I started a series of posts om How to crack Passwords, one of the post was about cracking RAR passwords. After that post, I received a few requests to ways to crack or hack the ZIP Passwords. Then I came to know that there is a huge community which uses ZIP and not RAR formats for the file compression. Hence I searched for a tool to recover or crack lost ZIP passwords and came out with the following.

PicoZIP Password Recovery Tool – Crack, Remove, Recover or Break Lost ZIP Password
PicoZip Recovery Tool is an easy-to-use program that helps you recover lost or forgotten passwords from password protected Zip files created by compression utilities like PicoZip, WinZip, PKZip, etc. It is a freeware and can be downloaded from many of the software repository sites totally free of cost.

Key features of this ZIP Password Cracker
Self-extracting Zip files are supported
You can chose Brute Force or Dictionary based recovery methods
A 650,000+ words English dictionary is included
SFX Zip files also supported
If you want to use PicZIP Password cracker as a portable password recover tool, then you can just download the installer and install to the default folder C:\Program Files\PicoZipRT. Then copy all files (except UNWISE.EXE and INSTALL.LOG) into a folder of your choice. Finally, uninstall the program. Launch the program by double-clicking on PicoRecovery.exe.

Caution: I just read this review on SnapFiles, where it no longer exists as a download


Don’t expect too much – “The program will work as advertised, but with an exception: It does NOT work with AES-encrypted ZIP archives. It does work with ZIP 2.0-compatible encryption, provided that the person who encrypted the archive was dumb enough to use a password which (a) is a meaningful word in any language, (b) is 7 characters and shorter, (c) does not contain any special characters. A password as simple as “my7good3ness” will not be retrieved either by the dictionary method (because the word AS TYPED is in no dictionary) or by the Brute Force method because id would take years.”

Whatever be the case, you can still try to use this on your password protected ZIP files. Who knows which tool is able to work, when it comes to password recovey. Many times it is a matter of chance or luck.
download here