The exact quote:
"And though the data was hashed to make it difficult to decipher, it's highly likely hackers were able to decode much of it."
:highly_amused: Really? You can tell from reading that piece that the guy does not know what hashing is. An MD5 hashing operation is a one way deal. You go from string to hash, and it does not go back the other way. It is not like encryption which merely encodes the string using a private key. Encryption CAN be broken. Hashing cannot. You would need the salt to even start trying.
Breaking a hash involves guessing strings, running them through a hash algorithm and hoping to hit the right combination. That's the equivalent of sitting in front of a log-in screen and just randomly entering passwords until you hit the right one.
Here are some examples:
Value - "Welcome to Gatefans."
Hash - fb519afac73c2e502449c74fe297e81a
Value - "Hi"
Hash - c1a5298f939e87e8f962a5edfc206918
Value - "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum."
Hash - 01aad0e51fcd5582b307613842e4ffe5
A hash is basically a fingerprint produced from the digested input used to make sure that the value provided is correct. No matter how long the string, the returned value is always exactly 32 bytes (for a 128-bit MD5 hash), which is a 16-digit hexadecimal value (or 128 bit value). You can't "decipher" that 32 chatacter value to its original value. The only way to hack an MD5 hash is to keep MD5-hashing text, characters and values until you get a matching MD5 hash back. In other words, wildly guessing.