Unfortunately, the asterisks are merely a cosmetic layer of security designed almost exclusively to prevent over-the-shoulder snooping. Unless a passer-by diligently monitors your keystrokes it would be impossible for them to discover your password. Unfortunately, not actually.
BulletsPassView if another free portable utility from Nirsoft that, once again, is appropriately named. BulletsPassView will actively monitor all text boxes in Windows or password fields in Internet Explorer and remove the visual asterisks abstraction – instead unveiling the password in plain text!
If you have Internet Explorer set to save your passwords for convenience – this program should be causing a moment of panic in your chest. It’s at this point you should know that BulletspassView is limited to just Internet Explorer while other browsers such as Firefox and Chrome rely on different methods of password obscuration. However, it’s use is not limited to just Microsoft products as many other 3rd party applications leverage the same methods as Internet Explorer. In my testing I was quick to find that my FTP client of choice, Filezilla, was also leaky.
BulletsPassView provides a few features once the passwords are collected – including a complete dump of all the captured data. Did you really need one last reason to ultimately ditch Internet Explorer? It’s important to note that it’s usage does not all have to be of the nefarious type; it can be quite the password recovery tool in applications that otherwise contain no password management functionality or retrieval. Having forgotten an FTP password left unused in years – it’s quite a savior at that point.
BulletsPassView is supported under all versions of Windows including Windows 7 and 64-bit releases.
Update
Since the time of this post NirSoft has released a utility that expands the concept of BulletsPassView to support more applications including Firefox and Chrome – WebBrowserPassView.
