In fact, there's almost nothing preventing crackers from deciphering the hashes. LivingSocial used the SHA1 algorithm, which as mentioned earlier is woefully inadequate for password hashing. He also mentioned that the hashes had been "salted," meaning a unique set of bits had been added...
in just 16 minutes. It started with a brute-force crack for all passwords containing one to six characters, meaning his computer tried every possible combination starting with "a" and ending with "///." Because guesses have a maximum length of six and are comprised of 95...