I Am Not A Cryptographer, so take this with a grain of salt. Using a unique salt for each user "helps", but is still insecure. The problem is that hash function

I Am Not A Cryptographer, so take this with a grain of salt. Using a unique salt for each user "helps", but is still insecure. The problem is that hash functions such as SHA or MD5 are designed to be very fast. This means that even with unique salts it is still fairly trivial to try a large number of passwords on a large number of users and crack many or them. The parent poster has the right idea. For passwords, use bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF, or a stretched hash.