Worried About Hacked Passwords? Google Chrome Offers To Help

Google’s web browser will let users check if their passwords have been compromised or not.

With your digital life becoming intrinsic to everything you do on a daily basis, Google has kind of realised the importance of your safety on it. To show its concern, the search giant has introduced two new features, on the occasion of Safer Internet Day on 5 February this week called the Password Checkup and Cross Account Protection.

Password Checkup is an extension which lets Google detect a username and password on a site from over 4 billion stored credentials and check if it has already been compromised.

If your password has been tampered with, the Chrome extension would trigger an automatic warning and suggest a password-change, as mentioned in this Google Blog post.

Today, we’re introducing two new updates that will help keep your data secure: Password Checkup, a Chrome extension that helps protect your accounts from third party data breaches, and a new feature called Cross Account Protection #saferinternetdayhttps://t.co/L4JSztM69Q pic.twitter.com/CuHKYF1Ghh

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 5, 2019

The "Cross Account Protection" has been designed as a safety tool for the apps and websites which require a Google sign-in.

With this tool, Google says, it would be able to send information in case of an account hijacking attempt or other potential security and privacy threats to protect users as well as the platform.

This feature can prove to be vital, as most users rely on their Google account to log into third-party accounts.

We built ‘Password Checkup’ so that no one, including Google, can learn your account details. This is our first version of the ‘Password Checkup’, and we will be refining it in the coming months.

Kurt Thomas, Security and Anti-Abuse Research Scientist, Google

Google claims it has developed these privacy-protecting techniques with the help of cryptography researchers at both Google and Stanford University along with other major technology companies like Adobe, and the standards community at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

While the password checkup tool comes in handy, they aren’t the first ones to think of this feature. Troy Hunt, a well-known security expert, has come out with Pwned Passwords, a service that tries to help you in choosing a password which hasn’t been breached already.

He has created this service using a database of 500 million passwords compiled from previous breaches.