6 Steps to Protect Against a Data Breach

3. Employ a hashing mechanism to better protect stored customer passwords. Rather than "storing" passwords in any form, retailers should modify systems to use a "hashing" algorithm to authenticate users. For example, when a customer creates an account and a password, a hashing algorithm is used to create a "key" that's then stored in a database. The next time the customer tries to log in, the algorithm is performed.