Artificial intelligence can now help us with many daily tasks, whether at work or at university, for example coast. This gives you easy access to our online data.
A new study by cybersecurity firm Home Security Heroes shows how AI-powered tools can be used to crack common passwords in minutes or seconds.
For the study, security experts from Home Security Heroes used a tool called PassGAN, a new AI-powered password cracking tool that relies on machine learning and neural networks, to crack analytical passwords and crack manual passwords.
Unlike typical password crackers; PassGAN is based on a static dataset running through two neural networks: one that learns to generate passwords and the other that learns to distinguish fake passwords from real passwords and real leaks. During training, these generative adaptive networks learned to make more complex password predictions, allowing for faster and broader hacking. Hence, these tools are a serious threat to your online security.
inside the cave; PassGAN was trained with over 15 million passwords from the 2009 RockYou leak; A dataset is often used to train password crackers, and the conclusions security experts have drawn are somewhat troubling:
- The tool cracks 51% of common passwords in less than a minute.
- 65% of common passwords are cracked in less than an hour.
- 71% of passwords are hacked in less than a day.
- 81% of passwords have been hacked in less than a month.
Password length and complexity are factors in cracking, and it only took PassGAN six minutes to crack a seven-digit password, even though it contained uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. It only took 3 minutes to crack a 13-digit password.
as expected; Passwords that combine length and complexity are the most secure, with a 9-digit password with letters, symbols, and numbers likely to take 5 years to crack and a password with only 18 digits 10 months. An 18-character password containing symbols, numbers, lowercase and uppercase letters could take 6 trillion years to crack.
How do you protect your passwords?
Based on their findings, the security experts at Home Security Heroes share some tips:
1- Use a strong password:
The longer and more complex your password, the less likely it is to be cracked. This means taking care to create a password of at least 15 characters, containing uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, and avoiding obvious or easily predictable password patterns.
2- Change your password regularly:
Make sure to change your online account passwords from time to time to prevent misuse because if your information has been compromised, you may not know until the company tells you of the greater risks.
Therefore, changing passwords regularly is an important proactive step in protecting your information.
3- Do not use the same password on multiple accounts:
Using the same password for multiple accounts makes them all vulnerable to hackers at all times because if a hacker gets a password for a website or service, he can easily use it to hack all the other accounts that use that password.