"Researchers Reverse 320 Million Hashed Passwords"

Researchers have reversed the hashes of 320 million hashed passwords revealed by an online service, “Pwned Passwords”, created by security researcher, Troy Hunt, which allows users to search through a database of breached passwords in hopes of preventing the repeated use of such passwords. The Pwned Passwords database could also be dowloaded for use by service providers in order to prohibit users from selecting passwords that are within the database. The reverse of hashed passwords provided by the Pwned Passwords database revealed many things in regards to what the database contains, the Hashcat password recovery tool, charset distribution, and length distribution of paswords. This article further discusses the results of this study, the blacklist approach to leaked passwords, and the importance of multi-factor authentication.

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