All you need to do to figure out the hash for a password is take the MD5 hash of it. My guess is the commenter you replied to just took some common passwords and some no-brainers and did a quick little "find all" for each hash.

Here's a tool you can use to generate MD5 hashes for given passwords: http://www.iwebtool.com/md5?string=stratfor

Going from the hashes to the passwords requires brute forcing, dictionary attacks, that sort of thing.

I assume that he just grepped for the md5 hash of the common passwords he tried.

e.g., grep `md5 -s 'password' | cut -d ' ' -f 4` password_file | wc -l

Assume it has.