In the past, when AI was not so powerful, commonly used passwords (also known as weak passwords) were easily cracked by hackers. However, with the rapid development of AI this year, the cracking speed has become quite astonishing. A foreign website conducted a test on 15 million commonly used passwords to see how long it would take for AI to crack them. As a result, 50% of the passwords were successfully cracked in less than one minute, which is less than the time it takes to read an article. This means that if you are still using commonly used passwords today, it may be very dangerous.
Research shows that AI can now crack more than half of commonly used passwords in less than a minute, faster than you can read an article
According to foreign media PCWorld, foreign network security company Home Security Heroes conducted an experiment using a new password cracking program PassGAN to test 15 million passwords obtained from the 2009 RockYou vulnerability to see how long it would take.
This new PassGAN password cracking program is driven by two neural networks. The test results are very empirical. Passwords with few characters will be cracked quickly, and slightly more complex passwords will only take a little time to crack. Overall, PassGAN can crack 51% of common passwords in one minute, 65% in one hour, 71% in one day, and 81% in one month.
As you can notice from the graph below, if you only use numbers, even 17 numbers, the AI only takes 3 weeks to crack, with the 18th taking longer, around 10 months. To be honest, the security of using only English letters is not very high. It is safest to use at least 14 random numbers of English letters. The current AI will take 23,000 years to crack. The most secure way to set a password is undoubtedly numbers + uppercase and lowercase English characters + symbols. It would take 11 characters for AI to take 356 years:
Therefore, the password must be at least 10 characters long to be considered qualified. The following are quite easy to be cracked by AI.
Home Security Heroes also provides several suggestions, first, “Please do not reuse passwords,” secondly, “Change your passwords frequently, especially for hacked websites,” and finally, “Please use passwords that are at least 15 characters in length, use at least a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols in the string, and do not follow any predictable words or phrases.
ReportingThere is also a function to test whether the password is easy to be cracked by AI. Enter your commonly used password, and the right side will tell you how long it takes for the AI to take. For example, if I enter ji394su3, which many Taiwanese people use, the AI only takes 48 minutes:
Of course, if the password is so long, you will wonder how you can remember it! I highly recommend using password management tools, such as 1Password, LastPass, and NordPass. These are well-known and safe choices on the market. They also provide password generation functions. Set the length you want, how many numbers, symbols, etc., and a suitable password will be automatically generated without you having to think about it yourself.
Source: KOCPC Chinese