Salting a password makes it less likely an account will vulnerable to hackers using rainbow tables, which are essentially dictionaries of hashes that allow someone to discover what a user's unencrypted password is.

"Salts are designed to ensure that the generated hash is different even if the same password is being hashed," Miller said. "The larger the salt, the more different hashes exist for the same password. This generally means that Rainbow Tables are not a feasible option for cracking salted hashes because there are too many combinations to create.

"This means that attackers have to rely on dictionary-based password attacks, which has to calculate every possible salted hash for each password in the password dictionary. This means that weak passwords will be able to be cracked easily, and stronger passwords are more likely to remain secured."

Rohan Pearce is the editor of Techworld Australia. Contact him at rohan_pearce at idg.com.au.

Follow Rohan on Twitter: @rohan_p