PDFPasswordRecovery

[guinness]

Tested: Portable

Appnimi PDFPasswordRecovery is the FREE software to recover the password of protected PDF documents. It uses brute force password recovery technique which can help you to recover not only easy but also complex passwords. Even the beginners can easily use this tool with its cool GUI interface.

How to extract: Download the installer and install to the default folder. Copy all files in $INSTDIR (except Uninstall.exe) to a folder of your choice. Uninstall the application. Launch AppnimiPDFPasswordRecovery.exe.

Download: http://securityxploded.com/pdf-password-recovery.php

It doesn't appear to require Java, compared to its predecessor PDFUnlocker.

[webfork]

Good stuff, thanks

[joby_toss]

I strongly believe that both of these apps require Java (check Task Manager upon launch for javaw.exe)!

Another thing: I think they are complementary apps - one decrypts (unlocks permissions) pdf files and one recovers the owner passwords (can't open the files without them).

[webfork]

You never care about these apps until you find some random important-looking password-protected file on your system.

I think they are complementary apps

I think so too...

PDFPasswordRecovery is the FREE software to recover the password of protected PDF documents ... it can be used by anyone who has forgotten the password of their PDF document.

and

PDFUnlocker is a FREE tool to remove the lost password of PDF document and completely unlock all its features.

... but will test those out sometime soon.

Edit: Yes -- both require Java.

Note that both programs are extracted by the method guiness pointed out at the beginning of the thread: UniExtract and move files from $INSTDIR

Edit2: actually I got some kind of error with Uniextract, so I went back and used 7-zip successfully. Just open the setup file and copy all files except the "$PLUGINSDIR" folder.