Lack of security? Suggestion for improvement

I’m sorry, I’m not even a security expert, but I have a few questions surrounding this.

  1. Why was the password human-readable and not encrypted
    1.1) If it was encrypted why was he decrypting it.
  2. How did he have access to them, group policy should stop this,
  3. He was in violation of security by checking passwords.

Longer passwords are more secure however it depends on the encryption. Hashing a password such as “TsNz_(2.,dh=?^r_P<” returns the following,.

“9FC46B186578EDE3B501F3F4989050DD6674513E93B83EC557A33A5C73FF2376BCA8CBEBF9C8334AA3FF726DD6FEC2D39A6902E7B53DA7EF5AD0107E7E27D5BC”

Not something that is easy to decrypt… Even if a database administrator was able to get access and view them for a second, it’d have no impact, and even if someone was able to gain access to the encrypted pass, on average it’d take It would take a computer about 380 QUADRILLION YEARS to crack that password, AND by then the breach would’ve been detected and people requested to change passwords.

I also used SHA-512 above, Many companies will have their own encryption algorithm which can’t be cracked using a web-decryption-tool.

Longer passwords are more secure.