MD5 passwords ‘no longer safe’

The original author of the MD5 password hash algorithm has publicly declared his software end-of-life and is “no longer considered safe” to use on commercial websites.

This comes only a day after a data breach led to 6.46 million LinkedIn hashed passwords leaking to the Web. Since the data breach, thousands of passwords, including many that could be considered strong, have been decrypted, either through brute force or through lookups.