Is it possible to decrypt MD5 hashes?

Question

Someone told me that he has seen software systems that:

1. retrieve MD5 encrypted passwords from other systems;
2. decrypt the encrypted passwords and

Answer 1

There's no easy way to do it. This is kind of the point of hashing the password in the first place. :)

One thing you should be able to do is set a temporary password for them manually and send them that.

I hesitate to mention this because it's a bad idea (and it's not guaranteed to work anyway), but you could try looking up the hash in a rainbow table like milw0rm to see if you can recover the old password that way.