In the era of classic ASP and early databases, MD5 was a standard choice for hashing passwords. Today, MD5 is entirely broken; modern GPUs can compute billions of MD5 hashes per second, making brute-force attacks and rainbow table lookups trivial.
In the earliest iterations of these portals, security was often an afterthought. Databases were frequently stored in web-accessible directories, and user credentials were saved in ways that would be considered catastrophic by modern standards. The "Passwords R Better" Shift db main mdb asp nuke passwords r better