Cracking passwords with more than 10 characters in a few hours? I came across this article from 2 years ago: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2331984/Think-strong-password-Hackers-crack-16-character-passwords-hour.html

They're describing how a team of "hackers" cracked passwords such as this "qeadzcwrsfxv1331" or this "Qbesancon321" in just a few hours. How is that even possible? I've seen before people describing passwords with 12 characters or more (16 in the above case) to take supposedly thousands of years to crack. What's going on in this case? Ok, so in this case the team had the hashed passwords available, but a 16 character password in a few hours?
Like Ricky Demer suggested, qeadzcwrsfxv is a common finger pattern (similar to something like asdfghjk).

The second example falls in the pattern of: Take dictionary word (besancon is the name of a city), uppercase the first letter and add a couple of digits after it (usually 123, 321, 007 or a year like 1998). Then a couple of rule-based alterations are tried: add a random letter, change a letter to a symbol (e.g. s => $) and so on.

A third way one of these passwords could have been cracked is by them being reused from another hack (e.g. the user used a variation of the password he used from linkedin).

In short, humans are very predictable in how they generate passwords.

A truly random password looks like this: T8vWdvLGhpRi9Gb. No discernable words or patterns. Numbers, lowercase and capital letters properly mixed together.  A password like this could only be broken by being reused on multiple websites or by being intercepted somehow.