Protecting your online accounts with strong passwords has become more critical than ever before, as a new study reveals how easily artificial intelligence (AI) can crack commonly used passwords. Now how to protect your password. According to a cybersecurity firm, Home Security Heroes, AI algorithms can crack 51% of common passwords in less than a minute. The study utilized PassGAN, a password generator that uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to create realistic passwords that users may employ. The GAN is a machine learning model that consists of two neural networks that compete against each other to improve the accuracy of predictions.
The generator produces fake data to trick the discriminator, whose job is to differentiate between real and fake data created by the generator. This becomes a cat-and-mouse game in which both networks benefit from the constant dispute. The generator continually improves to create better fake data, and the discriminator gets better at identifying the real data from the fake.
To train the PassGAN model, Home Security Heroes fed it with 15,680,000 common passwords from the RockYou dataset. This dataset is the result of a 2009 data breach of a widget developer for popular social media platforms such as MySpace and Facebook, resulting in the theft of data from over 32 million users. The dataset has become a popular option for training machine learning password-cracking models. The firm excluded passwords that were shorter than four characters and longer than 18 characters from the experiment.
According to Statista, six out of ten Americans have a password with a length between eight to 11 characters. However, less than one-third of the population utilizes a password with over 12 characters. It is understandable since shorter and simple passwords are easier to remember but more vulnerable to attacks.
PassGAN can crack a seven-character password in less than six minutes, even if it includes numbers, upper and lower case letters, and symbols. However, adding upper-case letters, numbers, and symbols to the mix increases the decryption time by up to five years. Therefore, having a long password with a challenging pattern is essential to make it harder for the AI to solve it quickly.
Home Security Heroes recommends creating a password with at least 15 characters with a strong pattern, combining two upper- and lower-case letters at the minimum with numbers and symbols. PassGAN can figure out a password with eight or nine characters in around seven hours and two weeks, respectively, even if you follow best practices. Passwords with 10 or 11 characters would take the AI approximately five and 365 years to decipher, respectively. A 15-character password, however, takes 14 billion years to decode.
It is vital to change your passwords periodically, preferably between three to six months. Furthermore, avoid using the same password for different accounts.
AI is here to stay, and the hardware that powers AI will improve over time. While AI brings many benefits to our daily lives, nothing prevents bad actors from leveraging it for malicious purposes, such as cracking passwords to steal your data. Therefore, it is crucial to take the necessary precautions to safeguard your online accounts from being hacked.
How to protect your password, tips to create strong passwords:
- Create a password with at least 15 characters with a strong pattern, combining two upper- and lower-case letters at the minimum with numbers and symbols.
- Avoid using personal information such as birthdates, phone numbers, or names.
- Avoid using common words or phrases, as they are easy to guess.
- Change your passwords periodically, preferably between three to six months.
- Avoid using the same password for different accounts.
- Consider using a password manager to create and store complex passwords securely.
- Use two-factor authentication whenever possible to add an extra layer of security to your accounts.
