The growing concern around the AI boom has marginally been over data privacy concerns. Several countries have launched investigations over OpenAI’s ChatGPT over data concerns in recent times citing that the technology could jeopardize people’s privacy. Now, a group of online security experts, Home Security Heroes, have found an AI that can crack passwords in less than a minute!
AI cracks passwords
It was only about time before AI technologies would take a sharp left turn and b become a threat to people’s privacy. The time is now here! Home Security Heroes found an AI password cracker called PassGAN which was then tested with a list of 15,680,000 passwords. The study revealed that PassGAN could breach over 51% of passwords in less than 60 seconds. It could crack 65% of the passwords in less than an hour and 81% within 30 days.
However, PassGAN can only crack easy-to-predict and generic passwords within a minute. It can easily guess small-length passwords within a minute which means if your password is your name followed by your birthdate then it can easily guess it. The study revealed furthermore that the AI cannot crack passwords over 18 characters and will take up to ten months to crack them.
Here are some of the steps you can follow to stay secure from AI breaching your accounts:
- Do not use one common password for all your accounts
- Change your passwords every three to six months as practice
- Do not use predictable and generic passwords
- Passwords must include 15 characters with a mix of symbols, numbers and alphabets
- Use a password manager
