Julian Assange is accused of working with Chelsea Manning to crack a Windows password. Instead, Microsoft makes life harder for cybercriminals and snoops by turning that plain text into scrambled code. For an attacker to get at the plain text it's possible to do a so-called "brute force attack." Back in 2010, it was possible to do that and recover the full hash value. But, as per the investigators' claims, there was some confusion: Manning said she wasn't even sure what she handed to Assange was the hash value they wanted.

Source: Forbes April 16, 2019 17:08 UTC