The danger of searching your password

One day I was typing in my masterpassword into the Bitwarden extension. After I hit enter to my horror I found out that the window had closed half way through and I had typed a chunk of my password into the adress bar and searched it with Duckduckgo.

That got me wondering. Are Duckduckgo searches not stored at all, or in anonymized form? I read contradictory information online. If all searches are anonymized and stored in a database to analyze popular search queries, that means that passwords that are typed into Duckduckgo could end up there.

I worry about the possibility of passwords finding their way into dictionaries that are used in brute force attacks that way. Am I right to be worried? I realize changing the password is the safe bet, but I memorized a really long and complex password so I’d rather not if it’s not necessary.

Thanks for the replies in advance.

1 Like

Based on what they say in the privacy policy, search queries are stored anonymised and nothing that is tied back to you.

Taking a guess that because the search query (your password) is unique whatever they recorded would become stale almost immediately and purged from their system. While popular search queries might stick around in their system for some time.

Since it wasn’t the full password, and there was no username or app name attached, I wouldn’t worry.

3 Likes