<p>Microsoft has quietly chosen to limit Hotmail passwords to just 16 characters, Costin Raiu suggests in a new blog post. Raiu is the director of security vendor Kaspersky Lab's global research and analysis team, and recently attempted to log into an "old" Hotmail account. Rather than accepting his 30-characters password as with previous times, Hotmail apparently prompted him to key in only the first 16 characters of his password instead.</p><p>As passwords are typically stored as one-way hashes, the only way Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) could have arbitrarily reduced the password length was to have either stored passwords in plaintext, or if it has always truncated passwords after the sixteenth character. The latter is certainly more plausible.</p><p>At the heart of the issue is how quickly modern processors and GPUs can crack password hashes. As a result, hackers who successfully break into a server and make away with password hashes may be able to determine the origin password within a short period of time.</p><p>This knowledge could then be used to log into other accounts that may share the same password. To combat this, the only viable way that users can make it harder for hackers would be to choose passwords consisting of random characters and to make sure that they are at least 12 characters.</p><p><a href="http://www.fiercecio.com/techwatch/story/hotmail-passwords-limited-just-16-characters/2012-09-25">Keep reading...</a></p>