Why hacked Blizzard passwords aren’t as hard to crack as company says

The silver lining in Thursday’s news that hackers extracted significant user information from online gaming empire Blizzard was that passwords were protected by an encryption scheme the company said is “extremely difficult” to crack. We reported that the use of cryptographic “salts” made it “extremely unlikely” that plaintext passwords could be derived from the cryptographic hashes. Security researchers, including those at Sophos and Intego, agreed.