New Delhi, April 12: The latest rage in the tech world is definitely generative AI tools similar to the ones like the insanely popular ChatGPT. In the age of the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), when a group of people sees it as incredible advancement, while the other thinks it as a major threat and source of utter devastation, the web world can get pretty confusing.

While AI tools can definitely help in several ways with incredible results, but at the same time the scary side of it is undeniable. Take the new AI tool for instance, which can crack passwords in just a few moments. This can be a boon for hackers and potentially disrupt the entire cybersecurity system. Let’s take a deeper look. ChatGPT Security Breach: Microsoft-Owned OpenAI Offering Up to $20,000 To Help Find Security Flaws in AI Chatbot.

AI To Disrupt Cybersecurity Eco-system With Password Cracking Tools?

A cybersecurity firm has recently released the results of a study that demonstrates how AI tools can analyse passwords and use the derived data to easily crack some of the most common passwords on the web world. 'Cheapest Foldable Phone in India': Tecno Phantom V Fold Launched, Check Unbelievable Price and Specifications.

Home Security Heroes, a cybersecurity firm used an AI tool called PassGAN to decode the most commonly used 4–7 character passwords in just a few seconds. The AI tool could easily crack the passwords even if there were variations in uppercase, lowercase alphanumeric formations with special characters. The shorter the password, the faster the tool got to crack it.

PassGAN AI tool uses the latest Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) machine learning model which has been fed more than 15 million common passwords. The vast data was collected from the biggest cybersecurity breaches of large companies such as Facebook and MySpace. These malware data have become the primary source for the machine learning password-cracking tools as per the researchers.

PassGAN was noted to be able to crack passwords with up to 6 characters without special characters or symbols in a moment. With symbols in place, the tool took 4 seconds to crack the passwords. Passwords with up to seven characters were also cracked instantly unless they had uppercase and lowercase variable alphabets, with all the alphanumeric and special character variations, at tool took a minimum 22 seconds to crack.

How To Protect Your Accounts With Passwords That Are Virtually Un-crackable?

In a nutshell, the study showed that the longer the password and the more variations it contained, the more difficult it got for the AI tool to crack it, and vice versa. It was noted the passwords longer than 12 characters, which contained a complex combination of uppercase and lowercase alphabets, numerals, as well as special characters were the most challenging for the AI tool PassGAN.

The study also determined that a 15-character or longer password with the above mentioned combination of alphanumeric and symbols, could take around 14 billion years for the AI tools to crack. Hence, users should avoid shorter and simpler passwords at all costs.

It is also imperative for the users to follow all the important password safety practices diligently, which includes changing passwords often, using more complex and longer passwords, not to keep the same password for multiple accounts, etc. The AI era certainly is intimidating, but humans can always find their way around for the problems they themselves create.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 12, 2023 02:04 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).