Google Releases Password Checkup for Chrome

Google has released a new Chrome extension that will help you protect your accounts from third-party data breaches.
“We help keep your Google Account safe by proactively detecting and responding to security threats. But we want to provide you with the same data breach protections for your accounts, beyond just Google apps and sites,” a new post to Google’s The Keyword blog notes. “This is where the new Password Checkup Chrome extension can help. If we detect that a username and password on a site you use is one of over 4 billion credentials that we know have been compromised, the extension will trigger an automatic warning and suggest that you change your password.”
If you do sign-in to a website with credentials that are known to have been compromised, Password Checkup will alert you to this and prompt you to change the password to prevent an account hacking.
“We built Password Checkup so that no one, including Google, can learn your account details,” the firm explains. “To do this, we developed privacy-protecting techniques with the help of cryptography researchers at both Google and Stanford University.”
Google also notes that it is addressing those times in which an attacker does make its way into your account via an app. A new tool called Cross Account Protection will trigger notifications for security events like account hijacking so that you can be better protected.
“We’ve designed the security events to be extremely limited to protect your privacy,” Google says. “We only share the fact that the security event happened. We only share basic information about the event, like whether your account was hijacked, or if we forced you to log back in because of suspicious activity. And we only share information with apps where you have logged in with Google.”
Tagged with Google Chrome, Security