How Passwords Are Cracked

Understanding how hackers crack passwords may motivate you to improve your password hygiene. This article explains how they do it. As the article points out, good password hygiene starts with using a long and strong password, but there are other things you can do.

A hash function allows a computer to input a string (some combination of letters, numbers, and symbols), take that string, mix it up, and output a fixed length string. That's why both strings above are of the same length, even though the strings' inputs were very different lengths.

Hashes can be created from nearly any digital content. Basically all digital content can be reduced to binary, or a series of 0s and 1s. Therefore, all digital content (images, documents, etc.) can be hashed.

There are many different hashing functions, some of which are more secure than others. The hashes above were generated with MD5 (MD stands for "Message Digest"). Different functions also differ in the length of hash they produce.

The same content in the same hash function will always produce the same hash. However, even a small change will alter the hash entirely.