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60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Eh, sorry, but you cannot crack hashes. At best you can come up with a strong that generates the same hash, but finding the exact original value won't happen, that's not how hashes work, that is not how anything works.
Each hash output value in principle can have an infinity of different inouts that lead to that output. Because of that, hashes are a one way street
Having said that, are you telling me that a properly salted hash using a modern algorithm like argon2id, or just even plain sha256, can be "cracked" in 14 days? I'm going to go ahead and say "no"
If you can generate an input which satisfies an md5 comparison which results in being able to authenticate with a system, then I think debating if that is a "crack" or not is purely semantic.
Although you are for sure technically right, I think any actually observed md5 collisions are with very large inputs, many orders of magnitudes longer than a password. The smallest input (first found, almost certainly) is almost certainly what the original password was.