Change your Google Chrome settings now or it could cost you

CHANGING your Google settings is one of the best ways to stay safe online.

If you’re constantly panicking about being hacked, you should take advantage of one of the best Google Chrome features.

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It could prevent hackers from getting into your accounts. Not just your Google account – but every service you use online.

That’s because Chrome comes with a built-in password manager.

It’s like a database of all your usernames and passwords for every app or service you use.

Every time you log into a service, you can save this password.

You’ll need to change the setting to “Remember this password” if given the option when you log in.

And when you sign in again, Chrome can enter the password for you.

This solves one of the biggest problems in online security: reused passwords.

We often reuse passwords because it’s difficult to remember multiple complicated passwords.

However, hackers can exploit this by using reused passwords to access a variety of accounts.

Google has previously warned that billions of passwords have been hacked – and are readily available online.

Hackers will take these huge databases of passwords and try them on your accounts.

If you’ve reused passwords, one attack is enough to break into many accounts.

But with a password manager, you can use a different password for each service.

And because you don’t have to remember them, you can have very complicated passwords that are difficult for hackers to guess.

Password check

That’s not all: the password manager also has a tool called Password Checkup.

It displays a warning when you log into a website with “any one of over 4 billion usernames and passwords” that have been compromised.

“Since we started, over 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 over 316,000 as unsafe – 1.5% of the logins scanned by the extension.”

There is obviously a great risk for anyone whose username and passwords have been hacked from various websites.

It’s important that you change your login details immediately to stay secure.

But passwords uploaded online without associated usernames can also put you at risk.

If you use a very simple password, chances are someone else is doing it too – and they may have been hacked themselves.

Hackers buy huge lists of these compromised passwords from many different websites because people often reuse them.

Therefore, hackers are far more likely to gain access to an account by forcing a long list of “known” hacked passwords than by trying random letters or numbers.

“Hijackers routinely attempt to log into websites on the Internet, with all credentials exposed through a third-party attack,” Pullman said.

“If you use strong, unique passwords for all your accounts, that risk goes away.”

Check your passwords

Just open the browser and click in the top right corner to go to the settings.

Then click the key icon to go to the password options.

Here you should see a section called “Saved Passwords” that contains all the websites for which you have saved your login details.

Then click “Check Passwords” and Chrome will scan your data and let you know if any have been compromised.

It will also tell you if any of your passwords are weak.

If this is the case, you can click a link to make the passwords stronger.

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