Google's Password Checkup Plug-in For Chrome Can Warn You If Your Password Was Stolen

It’s another way of locking you into Chrome, but it’s a useful tool.

- Mark Hachman

As data breaches become normalized, it’s more and more likely that your personal information may be exposed. But how will you know? In February, Google published a Chrome plug-in that will report if the login info you use in say, Yahoo, has been stolen.

Google’s Password Checkup plug-in (go.pcworld.com/4stp) won’t do anything until it detects that you’ve logged in to a site whose data has been previously compromised. If a login and password have been found in the recent “Collections” leak (go.pcworld.com/colk) of more than 2 billion usernames and passwords, a message will pop up warning that your information has been compromised. All told, Google has archived over 4 billion credentials that it feels have been compromised.