@John Adams - A salt is similar to a nonce. It is a type of encryption that uses the secret key to generate a random mashup of the salt + password and sends it encrypted. This makes it harder for anyone to guess passwords or use dictionary attacks against them. The generated password has an expiry time which also helps deter attacks.

I'd add another security tip to this excellent list - change passwords regularly and make sure they are strong ones. There's no such thing as 100% secure passwords and the longer an admin password sticks around, the more opportunities hackers have to decrypt them. Using a tool such as KeePass (http://keepass.info/ makes changing passwords a piece of cake. Use something like that to generate a very strong password (say, around 20 or so characters) enhances the security of the salted password. If the salt is, say 64 characters, and your password is, say 22 characters, that makes for an 86 character password that hackers would have to decrypt, unscrabble and try. It can be done, but it takes time and a hacker would have to be really determined to get in if they were going to be bothered trying.