Protect your accounts from data breaches with Google Password Checkup

Google helps keep your account safe from hijacking with a defense in depth strategy that spans prevention, detection, and mitigation. As part of this, Google regularly reset the passwords of Google accounts affected by third-party data breaches in the event of password reuse. This strategy has helped protect over 110 million users in the last two years alone. Without these safety measures, users would be at ten times the risk of account hijacking.

Google want to help you stay safe not just on Google, but elsewhere on the web as well. This is where the new Password Checkup Chrome extension can help. Whenever you sign in to a site, Password Checkup will trigger a warning if the username and password you use is one of over 4 billion credentials that Google knows to be unsafe.

Password Checkup was designed jointly with cryptography experts at Stanford University to ensure that Google never learns your username or password, and that any breach data stays safe from wider exposure. Since Password Checkup is an early experiment, we’re sharing the technical details behind our privacy preserving protocol to be transparent about how we keep your data secure.

Protecting your accounts

Password Checkup is currently available as an extension for Chrome. Since this is a first version, Google will continue refining it over the coming months, including improving site compatibility and username and password field detection.

We installed this browser plugin and it appears to be working well so far, give it a try !

Further details can be found here – https://security.googleblog.com/2019/02/protect-your-accounts-from-data.html