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There's a website that I changed my password on about 2 years ago, then quit. I know about 10 possibilities of what the password could be, and what I usually do is exchange a letter with a symbol, but in this case I can't seem to remember what I did.

Is there some kind of script or software I can use to help me put a few of my common words into it to help generate a list like the following:








Trying them all out by hand is killing me, I can't even remember which I've tried. If I had a list I could just copy and paste them in one by one, methodically.

By the way, the site offers no password recovery.

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If it's only a dozen or so permutations it will be longer to write a script than to just write them down in Notepad. –  Brad Patton Apr 9 '13 at 16:08

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up vote 1 down vote accepted

Not a complete solution, but then I don't think you are expecting that. In Excel, create a list for validation of A1 that contains your likely base words (in ColumnI in the example). Add (here B1:F2) the likely substitutions. Insert =SUBSTITUTE($A$1,B$1,B$2) in B4 and copy across as far as required and down a couple of rows. Enter 1 in A5 and 2 in A6. Adapt as necessary.

SU580406 example

The plan is to facilitate selecting a variety of base words (via validation) and apply a variety of substitutions (B2 for B1 etc) either for all instances (Row4) or for the first or second instances only.

However you would still need to be disciplined in keeping track of what you have attempted and what not yet (perhaps word by word with a flag in ColumnJ).

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Although this didn't exactly get my password, it is a great strategy that requires little programming knowledge. =CONCATENATE(B$2,$A3) helped a lot to try different number and symbol strings at the end, like password.0.0 p@ssword.0.0 –  Cayetano Gonçalves Apr 12 '13 at 20:41

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