Troy Hunt on how easy it is to crack passwords:
This approach to cracking involves the GPU in my AMD R9 290X (now getting on a couple of years old) calculating alphanumeric hashes between 6 and 10 characters long and comparing them to the ones in the breach. You can see from the speed above that we’re working through them at 3,012.4 MH/s or in other words, calculating more than 3 billion (yes, with a “B”) hashes per second. Crikey
Using the wrong type of encryption can result in a several year old computer burning through 3 billion password possibilities per second. Sure, the example is an extreme one - but how many sites that we trust with our data are using outdated security protocols? I'm not sure I even want to know.