The world has started exploring the powers of artificial intelligence and all that it can achieve with a little boost. While some people are apprehensive of AI, others are keen on finding out newer ways to benefit from it. While AI certainly has its benefits, there are the downsides too. In the last couple of months, there have been concerns about AI and how it can possibly compromise cybersecurity of people. And now, according to a recent study, your commonly-used passwords might be in danger as AI can crack them in under a minute.
AI cracks passwords in less than a minute
A recent study conducted by Home Security Heroes has found that over 50 per cent of commonly used passwords can be cracked by artificial intelligence (AI) in less than a minute. The study utilised an AI password cracker called PassGAN to test a list of 15,680,000 passwords, revealing that almost 51 per cent of the common passwords can be breached in less than a minute while 65 per cent of passwords could be cracked in under an hour. Moreover, the study also revealed that 81 per cent passwords could be breached within a month.
While AI can indeed guess your password in less than a minute, it is to be noted that this is possible only if you are using easy to predict and generic passwords of a small character length. For instance, your phone number, date of birth, etc. On the other hand, passwords that are a mix of characters and symbols, and are 18 characters long, will take longer to detect.
Coming back to the study, it added that passwords with 18 or more characters are generally safe from AI password crackers. Passwords of this length that only had numbers took at least 10 months to crack. Meanwhile, passwords containing a combination of symbols, numbers, upper and lower-case letters were the most secure, as it could take up to 6 quintillion years to crack them.
How to stay safe?
In order to stay safe, avoid easy to predict and general passwords, especially those that only have digits. Ideally, one should choose passwords that are at least of 15 characters in length and are a mix of characters, symbols, numbers, and upper and lower-case letters. If you have any concerns over remembering these kinds of passwords you may use a password manager to do what is necessary.
The study also says that one should have at least two letters (upper and lower-case), numbers, and symbols in their password. It is also advised to keep changing passwords ever three or six months as a practice. Lastly, one shouldn’t use one common password for all their accounts as this move is quite risky.