When a company stores your password for their business, they normally perform a mechanism called “hashing”. A hash is a one-way function which takes a word and gives it an apparently random string, such as “0571749e2ac330a7455809c6b0e7af90”’. Companies do this because if the function went in two directions, and some person got hold of its password database, they could just perform it backwards, and have all the original passwords. It was reported that more than 60% of the unique hashed passwords that were accessed by hackers from a LinkedIn password database, and posted online have already been cracked. A technique called “salting” can solve the password cracking problem. What is salting? Why is advancement in computer hardware a threat to password cracking?