PassGAN is the name of the artificial intelligence developed by the cybersecurity company Home Security Heroes. His only goal is to decipher and find passwords as quickly as possible and he does it very well as he managed to hack 51% of them in less than a minute. As these artificial intelligences become more and more present on the web, we explain how not to be vulnerable to their attacks.
Since ChatGPT, a whole range of tools based on artificial intelligence, also known as AI, have been developed to entertain us and help us in our daily lives.
Unfortunately, not all AI derivatives are there to do good, on the contrary.
If cybersecurity firm Home Security Heroes created PassGAN to educate us on how to use strong passwords, that means people with far less good intentions could do the same.
We explain how to make sure your password is strong enough not to be compromised in the event of an artificial intelligence attack.
A few seconds to find a simple password
Because Home Security Heroes wanted to develop an artificial intelligence that would find passwords as quickly as possible, the company used a database of more than 15 million passwords from the dark web.
Unfortunately, the way hackers sell our data online is a much simpler and more widespread reality than you might think.
In short, thanks to this well-stocked bank, Home Security Heroes claims that its AI PassGAN takes less than a minute to crack 51% of the most common passwords, while 65% of them resisted for no more than 24 hours.
For practice, PassGAN relies on a generator and a tester. Basically the generator creates strings and the tester tries to find them.
The reality is that PassGAN cracks and obtains a 7-digit password in less than 6 minutes.
It’s not very difficult to imagine what would happen if such artificial intelligence fell into the wrong hands, so having strong passwords is important.
What to do to create strong passwords
The weakness of an artificial intelligence like PassGAN are long passwords – we are talking about at least characters – and complex passwords that use a combination of lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and special characters.
In these cases, it takes more than ten billion years to decipher them, more precisely in the case of the tests carried out with the AI developed by Home Security Heroes.
We tend to think that it’s really difficult to create and remember so many long and complex passwords, but that’s what password managers are for.
For only a few tens of dollars a year, our password manager takes care of creating and storing all of our passwords.
You only need to enter certain scales, such as B. the desired length and type of combination, and they are automatically generated.
Then when we connect to our accounts, our passwords are automatically entered by the manager and its fill function.
In short, we don’t have to rack our brains or worry about the security of our accounts.
Without further delay, I invite you to consult the file that summarizes our comparisons and suggestions of the best password managers to be well protected.
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