For a number of years, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has been helping job seekers refine their resumes, assisting students with their homework, and helping friends and neighbors with their side-hustles on social media. AI is a powerful tool that is helping millions of people make their lives more efficient. However, as with most well-intentioned advances in society and technology, AI is already having negative unintended consequences.

One such unintended consequence is the use of AI to assist cyber-criminals in hacking passwords. Enter PassGAN, an AI tool that can crack 51% of common passwords in less than a minute and 71% of common passwords in less than a day. A new study by Home Security Heroes details how PassGAN can achieve this incredible result by learning from the collection of real passwords exposed in past data breaches and using that information to crack current passwords. While passwords released in a hack or data breach from years ago may be otherwise useless alone, PassGAN takes what was otherwise dormant data and uses it to crack current passwords. The report acknowledges that this development “is a serious threat” to online security.