The question of the century: can AI really crack your passwords? Well, the answer might be a bit terrifying. The non-ending list of tasks that AI can perform now includes quickly and simply breaking our passwords. A report by the cybersecurity company Home Security Heroes explains reveals how AI technologies really assess passwords, so later utilize that data to break the most popular passwords used on the web.
How does such a thing actually work? Home Security Heroes identified popular four- to seven-character passwords via the PassGAN tool. It didn’t matter if there were different combinations of capital and lowercase characters, not even if there were digits. The tool had quite the time actually deciphering the shorter passwords. So, should we worry?! The newest Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) machine learning model, fed with over 15 million common passwords, is used by PassGAN.
Those passwords were acquired from a database known as RockYou data collection, full of information from well-known hacks of Facebook. According to Tom’s Hardware, that database has somehow become a standard source for these advanced machine-learning password-cracking models.
What’s the takeaway here?
Practically, the survey found that the hardest passwords to crack were, wait for it…those that were longer than 12 characters! The passwords were also a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, and, of course, numbers. PassGAN succeeded in estimating that it would take about 14 billion years for AI to decipher a 15-character password with such a combination. Well, that’s quite the work, isn’t it?!
How can you avoid getting your passwords cracked?
Easy! Remember standard password security procedures that include the following things really help:
- utilizing reputable password managers,
- updating your passwords frequently,
- never using the same password for several accounts.
According to other statistics made by Tom’s Hardware via Statista, found that six out of ten Americans actually use passwords between eight and eleven characters.
