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Friday 23 November 2018

Exporting Chrome Passwords

Recently I got an email saying that my data was being held to ransom and my accounts had been hacked. All I had to do was pay this kind citizen USD$900 and all would be well. This was a pretty poorly worded email which did not spark horror within me: not coding experts, but spammers.

Ignoring the 'ransom' element of the email, what this meant to me was that one of my lower level security passwords which I had used for a lot of stuff was unmasked, linked to my email address. Dammit.

Sigh. There is nothing like wasting a whole day in changing a shed-load of passwords. While none of them were mission critical, it was something I could have done without...

While for the past couple of years I have been changing passwords as I have thought about it, and creating unique passwords for each new site I have signed up to, I still had hundreds of log ins left which needed to be changed. Although I thought I was keeping quite good records, I realised that there were probably compromised logins which I was not aware of.

So how would I track those down? When I was a Firefox user, I could export my passwords. But in Chrome, I was not aware of an export facility. So I went hunting.

It turns out that it is fairly easy. Simply to to Chrome | Settings | Passwords | Saved Passwords | Menu | Export Passwords, and your passwords will download in a CSV file. If you view in Excel and auto filter for the affected password, you can see if you have any vulnerable accounts in the wild. Replace those passwords and you should be ticketty-boo again.

Then Shift & Delete the exported file - to bypass the recycle bin - and do a file clean-up on your PC so there is no trace of that file left (so your PC can't be got at to yield ALL your password secrets).


Sam

  • NB: if there are sites where you can't find where to change passwords, simply "forget" your password and go from the link they send you. Much easier than faffing about trying to find where they have hidden that how to information.

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