It is important to store the passwords of user accounts in a secure fashion. There have been many high profile incidents where a security breach resulted in hackers obtaining database dumps of user passwords. The 2012 LinkedIn hack and the recent Adobe hack are two out of many similar cases. Due to the fact that the passwords were stored in an inappropriate fashion, the hackers (read as crackers) were able to recover the passwords of many user accounts and publish them on the Internet, resulting in an embarrassing PR fiasco for the companies.