Your online security is at risk as researchers use AI to crack simple passwords
AI tools have taken the internet by storm and are being deployed to make apps more efficient. However, there are some AI tools that are also cracking user passwords and that's scary.
Highlights
- AI tools can crack simple passwords
- Passwords being cracked using PassGAN app
- Stronger & longer passwords being recommended
While ChatGPT might not be able to crack your social media accounts, some AI tools can. If you still use only a few characters or numbers for your passwords, your online account might be at risk as now AI tools have the ability to easily crack your social media accounts and sensitive information online.
Home Security Heroes, a cyber security organisation, published a report demonstrating how quick and efficient AI is at cracking passwords. The researchers demonstrated the significance of password security using PassGAN, a recently launched AI-powered application. According to the report, the researchers used PassGAN to examine approximately 15,680,000 passwords.
The fact that the technology was able to crack 51 percent of widely used passwords in under a minute makes the results extremely concerning. Approximately 65 percent of well-known passwords were removed in just one hour, compared to 71 percent and 81 percent in one day and one month, respectively.
Here's how it works
It has been observed that the AI software struggles with longer passwords. If you’re using only a number password of 18 characters it would take only 10 months to crack it. If your 12-digit password has both uppercase and lowercase letters, it may take a total of 289 years to decode it. If you are using the combination of numbers and symbols then it may take 2000 years to figure out and combining both yields up to 30,000 years.
What is PassGAN?
PassGAN is a password-generative adversarial network that creates password which is likely to be used by the typical person or a “discriminator network” that contrast the created password with actual password from the stolen data. The generative network learns from the discriminator network to generate stronger and more reliable passwords. Keep in mind that AI will become more powerful, and it's possible that in the future, more technologies like PassGAN will also become more powerful. So, we advise you to safeguard your codes as much as you can.
