Overview
The MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991. While it was once the industry standard for verifying file integrity and storing passwords, it is now considered insecure for cryptographic purposes.
Vulnerabilities
MD5 is susceptible to collision attacks, where an attacker can create two different files that produce the same MD5 hash. This allows for the creation of malicious files that appear to be legitimate.
Current Use
MD5 is still used for non-security purposes, such as checksums to verify that a file was not corrupted during a download, but it should never be used for security-sensitive tasks.