Warning about changing Google Chrome settings to avoid hacker attacks
10 months ago on July 31, 2023
There's a hidden feature in your Google Chrome browser that can help you avoid getting hacked in the future. It's one of the best ways to prevent your accounts from being hacked - not just on Google, but on any other online service. It's all about Chrome's built-in password manager, which is a database of all your usernames and passwords for every service you use, and you can save that password every time you log into a service. To do this, change the setting to "Remember this password" when you sign in to the service. When you log into the service again, Chrome will be able to enter the password for you. This solves one of the biggest security problems on the Internet: password reuse. We often reuse passwords because it's hard to remember multiple complex passwords. But hackers can take advantage of this by using reused passwords to access multiple accounts. Google recently warned that billions of passwords have been compromised and are easily accessible online. Hackers take these giant password databases and try them out on your accounts. If you reuse passwords, all it takes is one attack to compromise many accounts. But with a password manager, you can use different passwords for each service. And because you don't have to memorize them, you can use very complex passwords that are hard for hackers to guess.
That's not all: the password manager also includes a tool called Password Checkup, which displays a warning when you log into a site that uses "one of more than 4 billion usernames and passwords" that have been compromised. "Since launch, more than 650,000 people have participated in our early experiment," explained Google's Jennifer Pullman in 2019, "In the first month alone, we scanned 21 million usernames and passwords and flagged more than 316,000 as insecure - 1.5% of the logins scanned by the extension." Obviously, there is a huge risk for those whose usernames and passwords to various websites have been compromised. It's important to change your login details immediately to stay safe, but even passwords uploaded to the internet without being tied to a username can put you at risk. If you use a very simple password, chances are someone else is using it too, and they may have been compromised themselves. Hackers acquire huge lists of such compromised passwords from various websites because people often reuse them, so the likelihood of hackers gaining access to an account using a long list of "known" cracked passwords is much higher than using random letters or numbers. "Hackers regularly try to log into sites all over the Internet using all the credentials exposed by third-party hacking," says Pullman, "If you use strong, unique passwords for all your accounts, that risk disappears.
Check the passwords
Simply open your browser and click in the top right corner to go to Settings.
Then click on the key symbol to go to the password options.
Here you will see the "Saved Passwords" section, which will list all the sites for which you have saved your login details.
Then click the "Verify Passwords" button and Chrome will check your data and tell you if it has been compromised.
It will also tell you if your passwords are weak.
In this case, you can follow the link to make your passwords more secure.
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