Just a quick note today to get you thinking about a very big issue that is just over the security horizon.

As machine learning capabilities grow rapidly and mass storage pricing drops to close to zero, we will see a collision that will easily benefit common criminals. That is, they will begin to apply machine learning correlation and prediction capabilities to breach data – particularly passwords, in my opinion.

Millions of passwords are often breached at a time these days. Compiling these stolen password is quite easy, and with each added set, the idea of tracking and tracing individual users and their password selection patterns becomes trivial. Learning systems could be used to turn that raw data into insights about particular user patterns. For example, if a user continually creates passwords based on a season and a number (ex: Summer16) and several breaches show that same pattern as being associated with that particular user (ex: Summer16 on one site, Autumn12 on another and so on…) then the criminals can use prediction algorithms to create a custom dictionary to target that user. The dictionary set will be concise and is likely to be highly effective.

Hopefully, we have been teaching users not to use the same password in multiple locations – but a quick review of breach data sets show that these patterns are common. I believe they may well become the next evolution of bad password choices.

Now might be the time to add this to your awareness programs. Talk to users about password randomization, password vaults and the impacts that machine learning and AI are likely to have on crime. If we can change user behavior today, we may be able to prevent the breaches of tomorrow!