Data theft and security breaches have become so commonplace in our modern age that people have started to assume that out of the many passwords that they might use for the various accounts that they use on a day to day basis, one has definitely made it into the hands of some malicious individual that would want to use it in order to access your accounts and personal information online. If you want to stay as safe as possible, you are going to have to think fast and secure yourself.
Google is making it a bit easier to protect yourself by releasing an extension that you can use to ascertain whether or not any of your passwords have been compromised at any point in time. This extension is called “Password Checkup”, and it is quite a non-invasive extension that does not do much until it detects that some of your information might have been compromised at which point it will send you an alert that you would be able to use to change your password then and thereby securing your account and preventing further malicious activities.
The way this works is that this extension has access to an enormous database that contains billions of stolen account details. If you download the extension, it will check your account details with the ones that have been stolen and will let you know if it pops up. Getting a match means that your log in details are one of many that have been stolen over the course of the past few years, and while it may not be something that you have to worry about all that much you will definitely be able to change your password in time.
"Password Checkup [tool] is currently available as an extension for Chrome.", announced Google Security team in a blog post. Adding further, "Since this is a first version, we will continue refining it over the coming months, including improving site compatibility and username and password field detection."
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