Microsoft Office files can be password-protected in order to prevent tampering and ensure data integrity. But password-protected documents from earlier versions of Office are susceptible to having their hashes extracted with a simple program called office2john. Those extracted hashes can then be cracked using John the Ripper and Hashcat.
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To get started, we'll need to download the tool from GitHub since office2john is not included in the standard version of John the Ripper (which should already be installed in your Kali system). This can easily be accomplished with wget.
In regards to this specific attack, using Microsoft Office 2016 or 2019 documents or newer may not be effective, since office2john is designed to work on earlier versions of Office. However, as you can see above, Office 2016 may very well spit out a 2013 document without the user even knowing, so it doesn't mean a "new" file can't be cracked. Plus, there are still plenty of older Microsoft Office documents floating around out there, and some organizations continue to use these older versions, making this attack still very feasible today.
Today, we learned that password-protected Microsoft Office files are not quite as secure as one would be led to believe. We used a tool called office2john to extract the hash of a DOCX file, and then cracked that hash using John the Ripper and Hashcat. These types of files are still commonly used today, so if you come across one that has a password on it, rest easy knowing that there is a way to crack it.
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