Back in March, Microsoft announced a bunch of features coming to its Edge browser, including vertical tabs, Collections for the mobile client, and more. Another feature was Password Monitor, a nifty tool in the browser that scans users’ saved passwords against a database of “known breached credentials” to ascertain if the passwords face the risk of being compromised.
Now, the company has announced (spotted by Techdows) that the tool is rolling out to users running Insider builds of the Edge browser. The Canary and Dev channels should be receiving the feature first, with the Beta channel following them. The rollout is staggered, meaning that not all users will see the feature show up right away and it might be a few days till it is deployed to everyone. Users will have to be logged in to their personal Microsoft accounts, or school or work accounts to be able to receive this feature.
To check if the feature is live, you can head to the ellipsis menu (…) > Settings > Profiles > Passwords and look for a toggle that reads “Show alerts when passwords are found in an online leak”. Users can head to the Password Monitor dashboard by typing ‘edge://settings/passwords/PasswordMonitor’ in the URL and hitting enter. Any compromised credentials that are found by the tool in the dark web will be listed for users’ attention. The firm adds that the credentials are encrypted when being checked online and that the information about which passwords are affected are visible only to the user.
Other browsers such as Chrome and Firefox too provide tools to ensure the integrity of users’ saved credentials. While Google’s solution was through an extension, the search giant recently announced that it will be building it into the Security Checkup tool for Google Accounts.
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