How to know if your passwords have been leaked or hacked

A password is the only thing that separates the rest of the world from everything we do on the Internet. Bank accounts, online stores, cloud storage, email: everything is protected by a password, and if ours is weak we are in danger of being hacked. Do you want a few tips on how to build an indecipherable key? So, take a look at THIS POST.

What we are going to discuss in this post, however, is rather to see what we do after having created a good password. As much as we have tried to elaborate an intricate conjunction of characters, uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols, there is always one factor that we cannot control as users of any platform: external leaks.

To avoid that our password is exposed, the most advisable thing is usually change the access code every 2 or 3 months. Although very few people do this outside of the work environment, it is one of the few practices that assures us some peace of mind - within what is possible - in the face of a massive hack such as those that Dropbox, Yahoo and LinkedIn have suffered in recent times and that have left more than 2,200 million accounts fully exposed and for sale on the deep web.

Google's tool to check the security of your passwords

Recently, Microsoft has disclosed that more than 44 million active accounts still use passwords that had already been previously leaked. A piece of information that serves as an example to demonstrate the great ignorance that most users have about the information with which it is trafficked on the Internet. What can we do to protect ourselves from all this misinformation?

One of the utilities that Google offers in this regard is a new function called "Security review”, Which is integrated into the Password Manager for Chrome and Android.

Related Post: How to view and manage passwords stored in Chrome

Basically it is a tool that is responsible for reviewing the security of all users and passwords that we have stored in the browser. Thus, during the analysis the following data is checked:

• If any of the passwords used is weak or not very secure.
• If we are using a repeated password on more than one site.
• Finally, Google also checks if any of the passwords have been leaked by comparing them with more than 4 billion users and passwords that have been previously filtered by third parties.

To activate this new utility we only have to access the Google Password Manager and click on the button "Check passwords”(Quite intuitive, really). Once the analysis is finished, the system will show us a report with the results so that we can take the necessary actions to keep the integrity of all our online accounts intact. Quick and very easy to use.

In short, if we have a Google account, this is one of those tools that should be taken a look from time to time to make sure that everything is still in order.

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