The world has begun to explore the powers of artificial intelligence and what it can accomplish with a little help. While some individuals are worried about AI, others are eager to discover novel techniques that they can benefit from.
Though AI offers countless benefits, it also has certain disadvantages. Concerns have been raised in recent months regarding AI and how it may jeopardise people's cybersecurity.
A study conducted earlier this year by Home Security Heroes discovered that artificial intelligence (AI) can crack over 50% of regularly used passwords in less than a minute. The study used an AI password cracker called PassGAN to examine a dataset of 15,680,000 passwords, indicating that over 51% of common passwords can be cracked in less than a minute and 66% of passwords can be cracked in less than an hour.
While AI can guess your password in less than a minute, it should be highlighted that this is only feasible if you choose easy to predict and generic passwords with short character lengths. For example, your phone number, date of birth, and so on. Passwords with a mix of characters and symbols that are 18 characters long, on the other hand, will take longer to detect.
Additionally, the report stated that passwords with 18 or more characters are typically resistant to AI password cracking. It took at least ten months to crack passwords of this length that contained only numbers. The most difficult to crack passwords were those with a mix of symbols, digits, and upper- and lower-case characters, which might take up to 6 quintillion years.
Prevention tips
Avoid passwords that are simple to guess and common, especially ones with just numbers, to keep safe. The best passwords are at least 15 characters long and include a combination of characters, symbols, numbers, and upper- and lower-case letters. If you are worried about remembering these types of passwords, you can use a password manager to take the necessary action.
The report also recommends that an individual's password contain at least two characters (in upper- and lowercase), digits, and symbols. As a best practise, it is also advisable to keep updating passwords every three to six months. Last but not least, it is not advisable to use the same password for all of your accounts as it is extremely risky.
