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File encryption - screwed or not?

6

66FMC

Senior member
I don't have a lot of info yet, but there are some encrypted files at my friends work that aren't supposed to be. They are a civil engineering company, and the files are cad files.

I don't know how it happened or who did it, but I'm wondering how screwed they are if they don't have a key. Does Windows 2000 have built in file encryption, or would if have to be an installed file encryption program? Can they break the encryption through Microsoft's support, or who ever made the program if they lost the key?
 
My firend told me Windows said it was. At the lower left hand side of Windows Explorer.

They found this all out trying to transfer files off their old server
 
They're probably encrypted using EFS, built in encryption in NTFS. If you lose the keys you're screwed, it would take many life times to brute force the key used to encrypt them. I believe by default Administrator is also able to decrypt the files as long as you don't reinstall the OS, but I can't say for sure.
 
The administrator account of the machine that ceated the files should be able to decrypt them, as long as the permissions on the files have not been changed and the OS has not been reinstalled - this also assumes that the administrator of the machine has not disabled the recovery agent.

If the admin account required has been lost (e.g. OS reinstall) then the files are gone forever.
 
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