Practically everyone who has Internet has either been a victim, known a victim, or read about being a victim of stolen online credentials. According to normshield.com there are 3.8 billion stolen credentials. Google has tasked itself with making its users aware with quicker accuracy whether their credentials have been breached.
Google now has a new password extension that checks your credentials as you log in against a database of known previous data breaches. A study done by Google claims, “Based on anonymous telemetry from nearly 670,000 users and 21 million logins, we find that 1.5% of logins on the web involve breached credentials. By alerting users to this breach status, 26% of our warnings result in users migrating to a new password, at least as strong as the original.” Although 74% continue using the breached credentials, that’s still a considerable save.
To keep from being liable for another security breach, security.googleblog.com claims, “By design, the Password Checkup extension ensures that Google never learns your username or password, regardless of whether you enable telemetry, but we still want to provide this option if users would prefer not to share this information.” So when checking your this extension, you can choose whether to encrypt or not, but Google is not storing them for another potential attack to happen.
This tool is only available as an extension at the moment, but reports indicate intentions to integrate in a future version of Chrome so users get this feature without manually installing. For more information on this extension, visit hackread.com.
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