Fox News correspondent Madeleine Rivera has more on the rise of artificial intelligence as the federal government looks to address concerns and overcome the learning curve. Artificial intelligence tech has the ability to crack any kind of seven-character password in just six minutes, a new study has found. The research, shared by identity theft prevention company Home Security Heroes, said the same was true even if the password contains symbols. The company used a generative AI service called PassGAN to run through 15,680,000 common passwords from the Rockyou dataset to determine how long it would take to crack them. Rockyou is a data group used to train intelligent systems on password analysis.

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 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.

In our ever-expanding digital world, passwords are an inevitability: email, apps, subscriptions and loyalty programs -- nearly everything is designed to be secure behind a self-set code that permits entry. According to technology site TechCo, the average person has about 100 passwords, so it's no surprise that when signing up for a new account, individuals can sometimes get lazy with word choice. A new report by Home Security Heroes found that 51% of common passwords can be cracked in less than a minute using an AI password cracker, and 81% can be cracked in less than a month. Home Security Heroes used the AI password cracker PassGAN to run through a list of 15,680,000 passwords. The odds of AI decoding one's password increase when a password has a minimal amount of characters and lacks variety (only using lowercase, only using numbers, etc.).