In this case though, the choice of hashing algorithm is at least as important as the salt. If the attacker was motivated to have Jeff Atwood's password, he cou

In this case though, the choice of hashing algorithm is at least as important as the salt. If the attacker was motivated to have Jeff Atwood's password, he could have grabbed the salted hash and used a password cracker against it. We're talking a single password for a high profile user, so why not spend a few hours of CPU time on it? Only an adequate password hashing algorithm (ie, SLOW) would have really prevented this.