A search for "Hash Hunters" turns up marijuana-themed t-shirts for sale. It also brings up a password-cracking outsourcing service, payable in bitcoin.
Fearing data breaches, Web services often store hashes of passwords, or cryptographic representations of the passwords, which have been processed by an algorithm.
In the hands of a hacker, the hashes are useless unless they can be converted back to the original password. That's where Hash Hunters comes in.
Hash Hunters lets users post their hashes and offer a reward for a person who can convert it. It's not the first kind of website that takes such outsourced jobs, but it's possibly one of the few using only bitcoin, the pseudonymous virtual currency, as its only payment method.
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