Whenever you fill your credentials while login into your online account, due to security reasons it shows only asterisk characters instead of your original password.
In browsers there is a feature to save your passwords. It automatically fills up the login credentials whenever you opened up the login page. But in this case also you can’t see the password of your account. However you can see the password by visiting the options panel of your browser.
Read: Top 5 free softwares to Reveal your Asterisk Hidden Password
Now consider the scenario where you are using public computer where your browser can’t help you by reminding you the passwords. Many web services such as online banking or mail services come with security login feature (https), these services give you only few chance (3 to 5 times) to enter the correct password. If you fail to do so then it may be possible that your account get banned or locked.
If at first time you know what you password are entering inside the login field, you can easily avoid bad situations. The easiest way to know what is hidden behind asterisk character is using bookmarklet. I found a nice bookmarklet on Hacktrix blog. Here I am explaining one of it.
Drag the below given bookmarklet into your bookmark bar. Below given screenshot describes you how to drag it.
Now visit any webpage in which login is required. For example, let’s say Gmail.com. Enter your Gmail ID and password. Now click on the bookmarklet on the bookmark bar which you dragged in previous step.
A small dialog box appears displaying the password of your account. Here my password is toxicbird. Don’t try to login with this password in my account. Obviously it won’t work. 🙂
That’s how you can easily check the password behind asterisk characters. However this method is limited to web pages only. If you want to check the asterisk characters of tools such as Filezilla, FireFTP etc then check out our previous article Top 5 Free Softwares to Reveal your Asterisk hidden password. If you are a JavaScript geek and love Firefox you might like reading up on How to use Java Script for unmasking passwords on Firefox.
What do you think about services that unmasking passwords? Have you ever had a account blocked because of entering the wrong password 2-3 times inadvertently? Do let us know through your comments.
7 Comments
wow…Nice Article Himanshu…
First time knowing about this trick
That looks unethical actually.
When someone ticks the remember me password in public computer and forgets then the password can be know pretty easily.
i want to crack other user password, is it possible to know others password if we know the e-mail id
I’m trying that for long time but found no method and the methods available are like Phishing our own passwords(eg.sending mail to [email protected]). Please dont fell for those tricks. Also do share incase you got and technique for the same.
oh oooh great post thank you dude.
Great trick. But doesn’t work with IE8. Any solution for IE8??????
Solution for IE 8 is to use another browser. 😀