Researchers at a cybersecurity firm have tested an AI password cracker – PassGAN – on how good it is at cracking general passwords.
It’s revealed that a common password of simple alphabets or numbers would be cracked in seconds, while including characters would make it a bit more difficult. Also, the firm shared some best practices to keep yourself safe online.
PassGAN Password Cracker
Researchers at Home Security Heroes have published a report this week – citing how hard it is for an AI password cracker to find your passwords of any online account. They’ve taken PassGAN as an example in this case and made the below findings.
The AI-driven tool PassGAN was able to go through over 15,680,000 passwords across the internet, to crack 51% of common passwords in less than a minute! Solving 65% of those took less than an hour, while 81% of those in less than a month.
People using a 12-digit password with an upper and lowercase letter are fairly better since such passwords take 289 years for the tool to crack. Adding numbers to such a sequence will make it harder – 2,000 years and symbols to the mix will make it 30,000 years for cracking.
So you’re advised to set a password(for any online account) that’s of 12 digits or more with a combination of alphabets and numbers, to make it even more difficult. The PassGAN website also has a tool to tell you how easy it is to crack a random password you set. So make sure you set a strong one to make it harder for future hackers and practice this good method for all your online accounts – as AI tools like PassGAN will be more popular and spread more widely in the future.
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