A security analyst discovers that a company's username and password database were posted on an...

Salting and hashing are techniques that can improve the security of passwords stored in a database by making them harder to crack or reverse-engineer by hackers who might access the database12.

Salting is the process of adding a unique, random string of characters known only to the site to each password before it is hashed2. Hashing is the process of converting a password into a fixed-length string of characters, which cannot be reversed3. Salting and hashing ensure that the encryption process results in a different hash value, even when two passwords are the same1. This makes it more difficult for an attacker to use pre-computed tables or dictionaries to guess the passwords, or to exploit duplicate hashes in the database4.