We’ve talked before about the risks posed by lost and stolen passwords and the problem just keeps getting worse on a daily basis.

The site haveibeenpwned.com tracks lost and stolen passwords and is recognized as one of the best sources of information about how serious a problem this is. As of this writing, they show over account and password information of 11 billion accounts have been lost globally.

You can use the information on a site like that to find and change lost and stolen passwords. But it’s a very manual process. And it’s only one data source: it doesn’t have all the accounts and passwords that have been lost or stolen.

As an alternative, you can more easily and comprehensively discover accounts whose information has been lost or stolen and change them to protect yourself in a single location: the Password Protection feature in Avast One.

When you start Avast One, you can look for any lost or stolen passwords by clicking on On the left navigation bar, select Explore. Then click Password Protection.

When you click Open Password Protection, you’ll see a listing of all breaches associated with the emails you’ve registered as seen below under Compromised Passwords.

For each breached account, you can click Change Password to the right to resolve the issue.

That will bring up a dialog with information on the breach and a Change password button that will guide you through the process of changing the password.

If you’re already changed this password, you can click Mark as resolved.

You can add new emails to be monitored by clicking on Check data breaches for another email.

After you’ve done that, the email address will be added to monitoring and you’ll be notified of any breaches affecting that email.

Clicking on Breach monitoring will bring up the list of emails that are currently being monitored.

You can add additional emails here as well by clicking the blue Add an email button.

Click on the three dots to the right of the email to remove it or to force a new check for breaches affecting that email.

When you click Browser protection, it will bring up the browser protection feature that helps protect passwords saved in your browser from being stolen or accessed by unwanted applications.

The installed browsers are listed here, and if the box to the left of the browser is checked, this feature is enabled for this browser. You can disable this feature by clearing the check box.

You can configure how this feature behaves by clicking the arrow to the left of If a new app tries to access my browser passwords.

According to your preference, you can configure it to Automatically block access or Ask me to allow or block the first time.

You can also configure whether apps are allowed to access saved passwords. To do so scroll to the bottom of this page and click the blue Add application button.

You'll then have a list of installed applications to choose from.

Click Add to the right of the application to select it. You can also manually locate an application by clicking the Select app location button.

Once you’ve selected an application, it will be blocked by default, preventing it from accessing the browser’s saved passwords. 

Allow access by clicking the slider to the right of the application.

Avast One Password Protection is included in Avast One Individual and Family subscription.

“Meet the Features” is an ongoing series to help introduce you to specific features in Avast products. It’s meant to help you understand and use a specific feature by explaining the security/privacy problem the feature is meant to solve and how it works so that you can quickly understand and use the feature to better protect yourself.

Have a feature you want to meet? Let us know.