MARCH 2021 PCWorld 93which is handy for checking up on friends and
family, though the service isn’t the most
privacy-conscious.
HPI’s service takes a different approach. It
lists the breaches by date, along with a matrix
of what information was exposed. If you enter
an email address on the site, it will send a
security report to that specific email, along
with a color-coded chart of what data is at risk
and from what breach.
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Both of the above services only reveal if a
specific email address has been part of a
breach, however—not if a non-email
username—“billg,” say—has been exposed.
Here, you’ll want a trusted service that knows
you, as well as the passwords you’ve chosen.
Don’t go chasing random sites to check your
passwords—you’ll want to stick with a few
trusted names. (Also, note that password
monitoring is a paid service for most
password managers—but not for those that
exist within a web browser.)
Google Password Checkup
In 2019, Google added a free browser
plugin for Chrome (go.pcworld.com/brpl)
that warned you, once you’d logged into a
compromised site, if your email or password
had been compromised. In October of 2019
Google began automatically checking
passwords (go.pcworld.com/chps) against
breaches, and as of Chrome 79 Google
began monitoring your online use (go.
pcworld.com/mnon) to protect you from
getting “phished,” or lured into divulging
your password under false pretenses.
Now, if you go to passwords.google.
com and authenticate yourself, Google’s
online Password Checkup will give you a
quick dashboard of which passwords have
been exposed in security breaches, which
have been duplicated across various sites,
and which you could improve with more
complex passwords to keep them from
being easily cracked in the event of a
breach. There are also links to change the
passwords on the sites themselves.
However, this works only if you’ve stored
passwords using Google itself.Google’s Password Checker has a handy dashboard
to show if your password has been compromised.