Artificial intelligence can now help us perform a lot of everyday tasks whether at work or study, such as: writing and correcting articles and code, summarizing and replying to long emails, explaining and simplifying complex concepts, and much more, but it also has a hidden side and can be used to easily access our data online.
A new study from the cybersecurity company Home Security Heroes has shown how a tool based on artificial intelligence technologies can be used to crack common passwords in minutes or seconds.
Security experts at Home Security Heroes used in the study a tool called PassGAN, which is a new type of artificial intelligence tools for hacking passwords, and its work is based on machine learning and neural networks to eliminate manual efforts in analyzing passwords for hacking.
Unlike typical password hacking tools that rely on static datasets, PassGAN works through two neural networks: one that learns to create passwords, and the other that learns to distinguish between fake passwords and real passwords taken from actual leaks. During their training, these generative adaptive networks learn to make more complex password predictions, allowing faster and large-scale hacking. Therefore, these tools pose a serious threat to your online security.
In the study, the PassGAN tool trained on more than 15 million passwords taken from the 2009 RockYou breach, a dataset often used to train password hacking tools, and the findings of security experts were somewhat alarming: