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Google has added a new service to help people know if their passwords are good enough to protect against hackers. Its Chrome Browser added the new “Password Alert” extension last week.
The extension alerts users if their Gmail password was used on a non-Gmail page.
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It’s getting harder and harder to have a good password these days. Hackers keep on getting savvier and new programs help them to crack most weaker passwords.
And we are, of course, talking about real passwords. As the man said, “only an idiot uses a password like 1, 2, 3, 4.” This also applies to using the word “password” itself or just your name or birthday.
It is also never advisable to use a real word as a password and recommended to use different passwords for different sites. Now most serious websites tell you if your password is strong or not when setting one and some will even reject the use of weak ones.
But what are people to do? It is not so easy to remember every password that you use, especially when there is a need these days for dozens of different ones. Let’s see, there’s your e mail account, Facebook, work access, banking site, credit card company, government web sites and so many more.
So web browsers offer to remember your passwords for you so that you do not need to enter them every time that you visit a site. But what about when you are using a different computer?
Also, what if your password was hacked, even if it was 12 characters long with random numbers and letters? How many times have you gotten bizarre e mails from friends or seen odd messages on Facebook, including links to nefarious web sites? It always turn out that your friend’s account was hacked.
So what are we to do?
Google claims to have an answer.
Google explained that with this new extension, if a user enters his Gmail or Google for Work password into anywhere other than accounts.google.com, the user will receive an alert, so he can change the password if needed.
Password Alert, the company boasts, also tries to detect fake Google sign-in pages to alert you before you’ve typed in your password. To do so, Password Alert checks the HTML of each page you visit to see if it’s impersonating a Google sign-in page.
Hopefully someone soon will develop a similar service for all of our passwords for all websites.
