The software mounts one of three types of attacks to "crack" the protection. These attacks are brute force, mask-based and dictionary-based attacks.

A dictionary-based attack tests possible passwords based on a list of possible passwords, and can be very successful when a naïve (or lazy) user has chosen a predictable password.

With AOPR you can use any number of dictionaries and a large number of specialized . You can also create your own dictionary; these are just plain text files with one word per line.

AOPR can be configured to try each word along with any or all of the following options: working through all combinations of lower and upper case, interchanging adjacent characters, skipping characters, and appending numeric characters to the word.

Your next choice is a brute force attack. This involves testing all possible passwords and it's sometimes the only way to recover a password. That said, while this could be considered the most reliable method, it is also the slowest with the actual maximum time required being directly dependent on the computing power of your system and the length of the password you're trying to break.