Artificial intelligence (AI) may simplify many routine jobs through efficiency and speed. However, 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.
PassGAN could decipher passwords of seven characters in less than six minutes—yes, even those with symbols. The most important security lesson from this is that passwords with more characters and greater character variability take much longer for AI to decipher. Fundamentally, if you want to keep your passwords safe from such AI crackers soon, 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 from AI
What can you do to safeguard against these technologies in the future? Start by never using a well-known word 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 challenging 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.
