60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

Happy World Password Day! Maybe it's finally time to kill this holiday in favor of World No-More-Passwords Day?

It’s World Password Day, and there’s really no better way to celebrate than with news that a majority of supposedly secure password hashes can be cracked with a single GPU in less than an hour, some in less than a minute.

Using a dataset of more than 231 million unique passwords sourced from dark web leaks - including 38 million added since its previous study - and hashing them with MD5, researchers at security firm Kaspersky found that, using a single Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics card, 60 percent of passwords could be cracked in less than an hour, and a full 48 percent in under 60 seconds.

Sure, that’s not exactly your run-of-the-mill desktop graphics processor given its price, but it highlights an important point: It takes surprisingly little to crack...

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