Crack Password Protected Vba Project Unviewable Vba

Mar 26, 2018 - I Finally Found It! I literally searched for years to find a reliable program that could protect VBA projects from all the readily available methods to.

I recently needed to unlock an Access VBA Project for which my client had lost the password. I was surprised to find that there was an incredibly simple hack that can unlock any Access password protected VBA project and I figured I’d share in case it could help others. Make a copy of the database in question and only work with the copy. Kp astrology software in tamil.

Never work with the original database file just in case anything goes wrong. Open the database file in any HEX Editor of your choosing. Find any and all occurrences of the term DPB= and change the B to another value (many tutorials suggest x, but it doesn’t seem to truly make any difference) Once you have replaced all the occurrences, perform a Save As to save these modification under a new file. Open the newly saved file in Access (like you would normally) and then go into the VBA editor.

You will receive several error messages, simply dismiss them all (and yes, there can be quite a few!). Open the Database Properties which will now have no password specified. Enter a new password and confirm it to resecure the VBA Project with a known password. Save the VBA Project Close the database That’s it, everything should now be in order.

Use your database as you normally do. With regards to Access in particular, being unlike any of the other Office applications, this illustrates the critical importance of always distributing your front-end as an mde/accde (by converting the db to mde/accde the VBA is completely inaccessible, hack or no hack) to your end-users where security is even mildly a concern (which is pretty much everywhere nowadays!). So take the extra 5-10 second, compile your databases and distribute the compiled version instead of the master mdb/accdb. This entire experience has drastically changed my opinion on overall Office/Access security and securing VBA projects as it appears to be completely futile! I’m surprised that with the importance of security in 2018 that Microsoft leaves it so very simple to hack this password.

You can unlock an Access VBA project in about 30 seconds with freely available tools. I’m also hoping that by shedding some light on this issue perhaps Microsoft will make the necessary changes to start protecting people’s information properly. This is completely unacceptable in 2018 IMHO. Cross I usually set up Front End databases as.accdr. My suggestion for what should be a very hard to break option would be to save your DB as.accde, and then rename to.accdr. When the DB opens run VBA code to make sure it is still an accdr.

If not then exit the DB. If a ‘savvy’ user tries to rename the.accdr to.accdb they will be out of luck, and if the base file is.accde format they have no way of modifying the VBA code to keep the DB open.

John Cross Database Analyst at Operation A.B.L.E. Of Greater Boston.