How to Crack Office Passwords with a Dictionary

**Executive summary:** This blog-style write-up demonstrates practical methods to recover passwords from Microsoft Office encrypted documents by extracting Office hashes (office2john.py), converting them for Hashcat, and using targeted custom dictionaries (generated with CeWL and expanded with hashcat-utils) plus hybrid attacks to achieve vastly faster recovery than brute-force; the author also validates the approach against the LinkedIn SHA-1 hash dump to show real-world effectiveness.