New AI tool created: cracks common passwords in less than a minute

Cyber security company Home Security Heroes has recently developed an AI tool that can crack most common passwords in less than a minute.

It is understood that the company's researchers used a model called PassGAN, which is a combination of password and GAN, where GAN stands for Generative Adversarial Network.

Generative adversarial networks consist of a generator, which generates the data, and a discriminator, which identifies whether the generated data is passable, much like two people sparring to improve the technique often used in the field of image generation. So, unlike the usual simple and brute force password generators, PassGAN learns from existing password leaks and generates new passwords.

The testers gave PassGAN a training set of 15.68 million commonly used passwords, mostly between 4 and 18 bits.

According to the test, 51% of the passwords were successfully cracked in less than 1 minute, 65% in 1 hour, 71% in 1 day and 81% in 1 month.

The report urges users to use strong passwords, suggesting a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols. Using a 12-character password as an example, it would take PassGAN 289 years to crack the password; if numbers were added, the time would increase to 2,000 years; if symbols were added, it would take 30,000 years.

The researchers recommend not using the same or similar passwords for multiple accounts, so that if one account is cracked, the others are not affected.

It is also advisable to change passwords regularly to increase account security. Protecting personal privacy and security must start with strengthening password and account security.