HELP please - PGP whole disk encryption password forgot

[Ecurb]

Hi,

A good friend of mine has forgot her password for her whole disk encrypted laptop. The screen says something like "IBM PGP encryption" and it appears right at bootup. She has some ideas on what the password could be, but so far none of them have worked. She is almost sure it is 10 charters long, first six are letters and last four are numbers. Is there anything that can be done?

Thanks,

Bruce

[nvemb3r]

It helps to keep very long or complicated passwords stored somewhere safe.

As for unlocking your encrypted notebook, the only way you can access it without the password or key is by cracking it. :(

Edited June 28, 2013 by nvemb3r

[Pwnd2Pwnr]

OK... slow down. Breathe a minute. Are ya calm? Good.

I have to ask the question I am sure everyone else is asking... "How does one lose their PGP encryption key?". Given the likely scenarios, the laptop in question was not owned (or at least, not setup), by your friend... but Elcomsoft has some nifty software. Sorry bud... I am washing my hands of this one... too fishy...

[Lost In Cyberia]

you dun goof'd

[Ecurb]

thanks for the replies so far. Well this is the situation. My friend and I work togther in IT and her past employer let her keep her work laptop after leaving but they had to reimage it so that no work data would leave the company. Anyway the image the company put on it had this encryption system that makes you reset the password every so many days. Recently she reset the password and simply can't remember what she set it to.

Please forgive im not very knowledgeable on IT security but the way I thought it could work is if you could get some software in before this encryption password screen, maybe via USB, then this cracking software could be configured to guss the password for you. Basically that is what we've been trying to do manually but it would be nice to let a program check all the basic combinations of what we think it could be.

Bruce

[digininja]

I'd reinstall the machine and then restore the offline backups that she made of her important data. Can be done in a couple of hours rather than spending time worrying about cracking crypto.

[Ecurb]

thanks digininja and the rest for the thoughts, it seems the software does what it's made to do well enough. I'll have to tell her there is nothing we can do. thanks again.