What improvements have been made to the computer over the past few years?

To protect the account holder, he declined to reveal the precise combination of characters and instead made up the imaginary passphrase "Sup3rThinkers" (minus the quotation marks) to illustrate his breakthrough. "Sup3rThinkers" follows a number of patterns that have become common: it opens with a common, five-letter word that begins with a capitalized letter and substitutes a 3 for an E, followed by a common, seven-letter word that also begins with a capital letter. While the speed of his system didn't hurt, cracking the password was largely the result of the collective codebreaking expertise developed online over the past few years.

The most important single contribution to cracking knowledge came in late 2009, when an SQL injection attack against online games service RockYou.com exposed 32 million plaintext passwords used by its members to log in to their accounts. The passcodes, which came to 14.3 million once duplicates were removed, were posted online; almost overnight, the unprecedented corpus of real-world credentials changed the way whitehat and blackhat hackers alike cracked passwords.