By its efficiency and speed, Artificial Intelligence (AI) may make many routine jobs simpler to complete. Nevertheless, these positive aspects of AI also make it a dangerous weapon in the hands of threat actors.
In less than a minute, an AI password cracker can decipher 51% of regularly used passwords, according to a recent analysis by Home Security Heroes. Consider yourself to be a password wiz? According to the study, 81% of passwords may be deciphered in less than a month.
Compared to a 7-character password, which PassGAN cracked in under 22 seconds, a password with 14 characters, including upper- and lower-case letters, would take AI, on average, 187 million years to decipher.
Passwords in danger
Home Security Heroes ran the AI password cracker PassGAN through a set of 15,680,000 passwords to arrive at this conclusion. Your passwords are vulnerable even without AI if they are simple and basic – all lowercase, no numbers, no special characters, etc.
In less than six minutes, PassGAN was able to decipher passwords of seven characters—yes, even those with symbols. The most important security lesson from this is that passwords with more characters and greater character variability take a lot longer for AI to decipher. Fundamentally, if you want to keep your passwords safe from such AI crackers in the near future, it’s advised to use longer, more varied passwords with less predictable sequences and words.
Compared to a 7-character password, which PassGAN cracked in under 22 seconds, a password with 14 characters, including upper- and lower-case letters, would take AI, on average, 187 million years to decipher.
Protecting your passwords
What can you do, then, to safeguard against these technologies in the future? Start by never using a word that is well-known as your password, especially something like your name, a location name, or a city.
Always include a combination of numerals, uppercase and lowercase letters, and special characters. Here’s an illustration: If I continued to use Bharat00 as my password, an AI programme might quickly crack it. Nevertheless, if I divided it into smaller pieces and threw some randomness into the mix, it would be difficult to get beyond; for instance, 04Bh&*Ar@tTt=53 would be much more difficult to crack.
On the Home Security Heroes website, you may find out how to secure a random password is when tested against AI tools.
