Google Chrome Users: Your Passwords May be at Risk

Posted: September 17, 2013

[caption id="attachment_11552" align="alignright" width="410"]© McCarony - Fotolia.com[/caption]Google Chrome users, you may be surprised to hear your Internet passwords are available to ANYONE with access to your computer. The Google Chrome password feature keeps all saved passwords (in plain text) under the settings panel in the browser. If this easy access to your critical passwords frightens you, a few options to alter the setting are available.

Jared Newman, writer for PCWorld and TechHive, explains how you can protect your passwords on Chrome.

Google Chrome policy exposes user passwords on purpose: Here's how to prevent it.

Google is taking some serious heat for the way Chrome can reveal all your saved passwords to anyone—anyone!—with access to your computer. Yet Google has defended the move, with Chrome's security tech lead arguing that further password protection measures would only provide a “false sense of security.”

The issue has to do with the way Chrome stores passwords that the user has decided to save. All of these passwords are the listed in chrome://settings/passwords. Clicking on a password in this list, and then clicking the “Show” button, exposes the password in plain text.

This isn't a new “feature” of Chrome, but it was brought to light recently by software developer Elliot Kember.

“[Users] don’t expect it to be this easy to see their passwords,” Kember wrote in a blog post. “Every day, millions of normal, every-day users are saving their passwords in Chrome. This is not okay.”

Read the full article Google Chrome Policy Exposes User Passwords on Purpose: Here's How to Prevent it on PCWorld.