Indeed, the assumption is that attacker has limited window of opportunity to grab the data. Taking that as a base assumption, it would make sense two store parts of the hashed password in two separate databases on two separate machines. Hacker would have to gain access to both. My initial alternative was to add some trick inside of the code, like a simple shuffling of characters. Assuming that code is not stored on the same machine as DB that should increase security considerably. But either concept would work. Of course it does not remove the need for higher degree of difficulty for hashing itself.