• Source:JND
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2023 will witness massive developments in the space of artificial intelligence. The positives might be endless, but the manipulation of AI can be dangerous. One such possible use case is compromising the passwords of users. While it might sound like a nightmare, it is a game of minutes for an AI password cracker.

According to Home Security Heroes, 51 per cent of common passwords can be cracked within a minute with the help of AI. The accuracy can go up to 81 per cent in less than a month. PassGAN, "an AI password cracker," was used by the company to run across 15,600,000 passwords from the Rockyou dataset to explore the duration AI takes to crack a password.

Further, the company shared - 4 and 5 character passwords with a combination of numbers, upper/lower case, letters and symbols, can be breached instantly. Further, PassGAN cracks a password with 7 characters with the above-stated combination of characters in less than six minutes.

The scary tool can crack a number-only password of 18 characters in a minimum of 10 months. An 18-character password with symbols, numbers, and lower/upper case letters will take 6 quintillion years to break.

When I tried it with a previous password of my Gmail account having 17 characters, it stated "an AI would need about 812 thousand years to crack the password."

"This latest approach uses Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to autonomously learn the distribution of real passwords from actual password leaks, eliminating the need for manual password analysis. While this makes password cracking faster and more efficient, it is a serious threat to your online security," the firm adds.

How To Stay Protected?

Home Security Heroes listed a few factors that can be used to ensure password strength.

- A minimum of 15 characters

- Use a minimum of "two letters (upper and lower case), numbers and symbols"

- Avoid common passwords with the above characters

Further, a user should change passwords "every 3 to 6 months." Immediately change passwords if you suspect a breach. Lastly, using the same passwords across multiple accounts "can be very risky," it shared.