Here's an interesting News.com article about the "Blue Hat" event at Microsoft. It featured "blue hat" crackers giving demos of how to break Microsoft code.
Even more intersting is the sidebar. One of the security consultants, Dan Kaminsky, talks about how the MD5 hash function is starting to be cracked. He has an interesting paper titled MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday. I didn't realize the progress that is being made attacking MD5. As he says, once people make progress you start to worry about it falling apart completely. Bottom line: try to avoid using MD5 for security.