Many of today's top passwords can be brute force cracked in less than an hour

It's a journo's rehash of blog post from Kaspersky. The blog post looks to be a brand awareness exercise.

The substance is they reported benchmarks of throwing a bunch of single round + MD5 passwords at hashcat running on a Nvidia RTX 4090. Turns out it's quick: 164 billion hashes per second.

If you assume a randomly generated password has 6 bits of entropy per character, then this will brute force a 8 character random password in under 30 minutes. 12 characters will extend that to a millennia.

The real take away is if you aren't using PBKDF2 or better to store passwords you are a menace to society.