The most common way to protect our online accounts, devices, and sensitive information is with passwords. Unfortunately, hackers are able to get into accounts that use weak passwords or the same password for more than one account. Artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play at this point. AI algorithms can quickly crack passwords that would have taken human hackers hours or even days to figure out.
This is because they can learn from large amounts of data and find patterns. AI can be both a useful tool for security experts and a threat to people’s privacy in this situation. In this article, we’ll look at how AI is used to break passwords, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and what that could mean for online security.
AI at Cracking Passwords
In the past few months, the usage of AI has proliferated. Although it was always present in the background, ChatGPT and other AI technologies have brought it into the mainstream. Security professionals have issued warnings regarding the usage of AI and the reasons it may pose a threat to cybersecurity.
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According to a recent study, AI can truly guess passwords quite quickly. A study by Home Security Heroes found that artificial intelligence (AI) can quickly hack nearly 51% of all common passwords. Additionally, 81% of passwords took less than a month to crack, compared to 65% of typical passwords that took less than an hour. The company ran a list of 15,680,000 passwords through PassGAN, an AI password cracker, and then released the findings.
What Kind of Passwords Are ‘Safe’ From AI?
The study found that passwords with more than 18 characters are often resistant to AI password crackers because it takes PassGAN at least 10 months to break passwords with only numbers. According to the study, passwords including symbols, numbers, lower-case letters, and upper-case letters might take 6 quintillion years to decipher.
How to Keep Your Passwords Safe?
The security research company claims that digit-only passwords are the simplest to break. Even a 10-character password made up exclusively of numbers can very immediately be cracked. The paper stated that whereas a ten-letter mixed-case password would take four weeks to crack, one with exclusively lowercase letters would take an hour.
It might take five years to understand a ten-character strong password made up of letters, symbols, and numbers. The company has provided a list of elements that make it harder to compromise the strength of your password:
- Use a minimum of 15 characters.
- Use symbols, numbers, and at least two letters (both capital and lowercase) in the password.
- Even if they contain all the appropriate character lengths and kinds, avoid using obvious password patterns.
