AI is coming for your password, and really fast

(Image: Moneycontrol)

An AI-assisted tool can crack 51 percent of the most commonly used passwords in under a minute, a new study has found.

Published by cybersecurity firm Home Security Heroes, the study used an AI-assisted password cracking tool, PassGAN, short for Password Generative Adversarial Network, to see how quickly it would crack a list of over 15 million compiled passwords.

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PassGAN can generate "multiple password properties and improve the quality of predicted passwords, making it easier for cybercriminals to crack your passwords and gain access to your personal data", the company said in the report.

Besides the 51 percent of the commonly used passwords, 65 percent were cracked in less than an hour, 71 percent in less than a day and 81 percent in less than a month.

Any password with less than six or fewer characters was instantly cracked and any password under 12 characters that only had numerals was also instantly cracked.

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It took PassGAN under six minutes to crack any kind of password with seven characters, even if it had special characters like symbols, the study said.

Passwords with more than 18 characters were safe against PassGAN, as it would take the tool 10 months to crack numerical passwords or six quintillion years to crack passwords with special characters.