The protection on Password Cracking.zip was insufficient against automated recovery tools. To improve security for future archives, it is recommended to use: Supported by tools like 7-Zip .

ZIP Archive (Standard/Legacy or AES-256 encryption)

The recovery process followed standard forensic procedures for password-protected archives:

John the Ripper or fcrackzip was used to process the hash.

Minimum 12 characters including symbols and numbers to resist dictionary-based attacks.