It just goes to show that in 2016, you really can't be using SHA1/256/512 for password hashing anymore, even salted. Bcrypt/Scrypt or similar is a must.
If it's 12 characters - then you're up to 10,000 years.
At my university we were forced to use passwords that are exactly 8 characters long, for some ridiculous reasons. And this was meant to be one of the top universities in Australia...
> Originally, some developer, somewhere, was working on an old Unix system from the previous century, which used the old DES-based "crypt", actually a password hashing function derived from the DES block cipher. In that hashing function, only the first eight characters of the password are used (and only the low 7 bits of each character, as well). Subsequent characters are ignored. That's the banana.
There are a number of KDFs that build on top of the SHA family, from PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 to sha512crypt, that are all fine in principle but are often used with iteration counts that are off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude.
5000 iterations sounds like a lot. It is not.