AI can crack most passwords faster than you can read this article
If you didn’t already believe that weak passwords could be cracked easily, artificial intelligence is here to prove the point definitively. An AI-driven tool cracked over half the passwords fed to it in under a minute – and 65 percent in under an hour. The experiment, which was run by cybersecurity firm Home Security Heroes, involved PassGAN, a new kind of password cracker. Unlike typical password cracking tools, which lean on fixed data sets, PassGAN is driven by two neural networks: one taught to generate passwords, and the other taught to distinguish between the first’s ‘fake’ passwords and passwords taken from real data breaches. As it’s trained, this kind of generative adaptive network learns to offer more sophisticated password predictions, allowing for faster and widespread cracking. For Home Security Heroes’…