"AI Can Crack Most Passwords in Less Than a Minute"

Researchers have discovered that Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can easily crack nearly all passwords. Researchers from Home Security Heroes fed millions of passwords from RockYou to the PassGAN AI platform to observe how quickly it could crack them. In the early days of social media, the widget RockYou was immensely popular on MySpace and, later, Facebook. However, it was compromised by hackers in 2009, and 32 million plaintext passwords were released to the dark web. The researchers extracted 15.6 million passwords from the data set and fed them into PassGAN, in which the passwords are now often used to train AI tools. PassGAN is a password generator based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that creates fake passwords mimicking real ones discovered in the wild. After excluding passwords shorter than four characters and longer than 18, researchers discovered that 51 percent of "common" passwords could be cracked in less than one minute. It required less than an hour to crack 65 percent, less than a day to crack 71 percent, and less than a month to identify 81 percent. This article continues to discuss the researchers' findings from running 15.6 million common passwords through an AI password cracker. 

TechRadar reports "AI Can Crack Most Passwords in Less Than a Minute"