Of History & Hashes: A Brief History of Password…

This article provides a historical survey of password security from ancient watchwords through early computing to modern practices, explaining password storage formats, weaknesses (plaintext, weak hashes, lack of salts, LM/NTLM issues), the evolution of hashing (DES crypt, MD5, SHA, bcrypt, PBKDF2), the rise of cracking tools and GPU acceleration, and defensive measures such as salts, slow hashes, shadowed stores, and newer Windows caching/hardening approaches.