TECH NEWS – Artificial intelligence has evolved to the point where it can effectively crack passwords using brute force, according to a new study.

There are two sides to artificial intelligence. It can be helpful (it’s no coincidence that Google is trying to put its Bard solution into its search engine), but it also has harmful uses. It might be able to crack our passwords, and it doesn’t need that much time, significantly, as the technology improves. According to a study on this issue, it could quickly go wrong if our passwords remain just numbers.

The study used a new artificial intelligence-driven tool, PassGAN, to show how seriously passwords should be taken. The researchers ran 15,680,000 passwords through the program and cracked common passwords in less than a minute 51% of the time. If you stretch the time to an hour, the rate increases to 65%. A day? 71%. A month? 81%. So in a month, more than 4/5 of passwords have been cracked.

But fear not: if you have a password of twelve characters, with both upper and lower case letters, that will take 289 years, and if you add numbers, you’re up to 2000 years. With symbols, it would take 30,000 years to crack the password. The study website also calculates how long it would take to brute-force crack a password. If you give a string of eleven numbers, instantly, the website says, but if you write it out in letters, suddenly, the answer is 2 trillion years.

Remember that technology, including software like PassGAN, will evolve, so reducing the time required to crack is almost fixed, so it makes sense to use more complex passwords. 1234567890 will not cut it even if it is the WiFi password on your router (that sounds rather lazy…).

Source: WCCFTech