Without going into way too much detail on cryptography, no, they haven't cracked encryption, not even slightly. SHA-256 may be brute-forceable, and they may be able to create rainbow tables for single-hashed encryptions, but you can just encrypt with SHA-256, salt and rehash with SHA-256 again and it would take a billion computers well over a billion years to approach a 50% likelihood of successfully brute-forcing double-hashed and salted SHA-256.
Probably got way too into cryptography there, but basically, if I want to encrypt something, I go from A>B. I can add whatever gibberish I want to 'B', and then encrypt it again to get C. If someone manages to crack 'C', they are just left with encrypted 'B' and whatever hexidecimal characters were used to 'salt', or randomize the encryption and would have to start from scratch again. You can salt and rehash unlimited times. You'd need quantum computers to carry out a bruteforce crack in a reasonable timeframe.
There are also loads of other encryption algorithms, such as serpent, twofish, AES-256, etc. that are also veritably uncrackable, particularly when used in combination with other algos.
Of course, that all assumes the NSA hasn't greased every palm in the cryptography game and gotten themselves a nice little backdoor entrance built, but the odds of that backdoor going unnoticed for as long as SHA-256 has been a global standard are astronomical. It would have been exploited long ago, and some gang in russia would be rolling in piles of billions of dollars.
lannyflaherty wrote:
