A team of hackers has managed to crack more than 14,800 supposedly random passwords from a list of 16,449 converted into hashes using the MD5 cryptographic hash function. The problem is the relatively weak method of encrypting passwords called hashing. Hashing takes each user’s plain text password and runs it through a one-way mathematical function. This creates a unique string of numbers and letters called the hash. It took him 20 hours to crack 14,734 of the hashes, a 90-percent success rate using Brute force attacks.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/cracking-16-character-strong-passwords.html