Quick Tip: How to Recover the lost password of Remote Desktop Manager?

I have recently come across a typical situation where I completely forgot the Remote Desktop manager’s password. I thought to recover the password by calling the help desk but I knew it is going to take so much time to get it back because of many regulatory and compliance issues. So I found a quick alternative. I wrote a power shell script to decrypt the lost password. Here are the steps:

1. Locate the RDCMan.exe file and copy the RDCMan.exe file with the DLL extension.

Copy-item ’C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Remote Desktop Connection Manager\RDCMan.exe' C:\RDCManDll\RDCMan.dll

2. Import this DLL by using PowerShell

Import-module C:\RDCManDll\RDCMan.dll

3. Now search the RDG file which contains the password in the Encrypted fashion. Here is the sample RDG file and open it in notepad.

This will show you the username and password in an encrypted format.

4. Copy the Encrypted password and paste it into the below-mentioned script. It will display the lost password.

$EncryptSettings=new-object -TypeName RdcMan.EncryptionSettings
$pwdstring= 'Encrypted password copied from text file depicted above'
[RdcMan.Encryption]::DecryptString($pwdstring,$EncryptSettings)
$pwdstring

Please find the full running code in one place

Copy-item ’C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Remote Desktop Connection Manager\RDCMan.exe' C:\RDCmandll\RDCMan.dll
Import-module C:\RDCmandll\RDCMan.dll
$EncryptSettings=new-object -TypeName RdcMan.EncryptionSettings
$pwdstring= 'Encrypted password copied from text file depicted above'
[RdcMan.Encryption]::DecryptString($pwdstring,$EncryptSettings)

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