A Rainbow Table is a premade set of hashes. Instead of guessing the user’s plain text password, you can just search the premade list of hashes to see if any match the hash of the user’s password. The advantage of using a rainbow table is that it is faster, especially with longer passwords.
The challenge of using a rainbow table is that the hacker needs to know which hashing method was used. There are different tables for different hashing methods.
To mitigate the risk of a rainbow table attack, developers “salt” their hashes. Salting means that additional random values are added to the original hash.
