Reveal a Password in your Browser with a Simple Trick

We are all often told to try and stay security conscious online, and passwords is one of the most important parts of creating a more secure environment for yourself. Different lengths, multiple character types, different login details for every site. This is especially the case when there are multiple users on the same machine.

Personally, I have so many different passwords, that I’d have to sit there with a giant piece of paper every time I wanted to log into a website if it wasn’t for ability to save them on your PC so you don’t have to remember them. These days, most browsers offer to store your login details for you and there are some great dedicated password managers around, such as Lastpass to make filling in forms and logins even easier.

When you type passwords in to web browsers, they are often hidden behind bullets or asterisks, which is fine when you know the password, but if you can’t remember and it’s being filled in automatically, you have to dig into the options of the browser or utility to find out what it is. There are plenty of tools to reveal passwords for you such as Bullet Pass View by Nir Sofer, but the other day I came across a very simple way to reveal a password in your browser without having to use any additional software at all. This was tested successfully on Chrome 18, Opera 11 and Firefox 11. The process is broadly the same for all three but I’m using Chrome to demonstrate.

Firstly, go to a web page where you have to log in such as Google, Raymond.cc or eBay, and hopefully your saved details will be entered from either the browser or password manager. The password will be hidden behind the bullets…

 Double click on the password to highlight it, then right click on it and select ‘Inspect element’. In Firefox you will then need to click on the HTML button to view the html content.

Once you are viewing the html content for the page, the line for the password input should already be highlighted, as shown below. Look on that line for the value type=”password”. Double click on ‘password’, delete it and then press Enter.

Look back to the login details and your password will be revealed!

This works in pretty much all windows where a password is hidden behind bullets and is just a simple trick to quickly reveal the password that has already been saved to the browser or password manager. This is also useful if you have very long passwords you enter yourself and would like to see what’s being typed in to avoid mistakes. It may only save a few seconds over getting it yourself, but is still a handy thing to know.

Directly Edit Website Live from any Web Browser

We periodically run contests in our forum to give out free licenses to registered members and we use a publicly available vBulletin add-on called vBulletin Raffles to automate the random selection of winners and also posting the results in a designated thread. The old method of asking the readers to post a comment to join the contest, manually extracting the names from the list, randomizing the list from random.org to pick the winner, contacting them via email and waiting for them to respond is just too much work. Moreover sometimes the email that I sent to the winner goes into their junk or spam folder and it takes even more time and effort in trying to send them the license. The good thing about using the vBulletin Raffles add-on is everything is automated as I only need to create the contest and send the license via private message where there’s no spam filter to block it.
Recently we were continuously being asked on how the winners are being selected and to at least provide a screenshot as a proof. To be honest, screenshots can be easily faked when we can effortlessly edit the non-editable text found on other websites. The changes are of course temporary and only visible to the person who changed it but not to other visitors.
The most basic method on editing a text or switching to a different image on a website is to save the webpage to your hard drive by simultaneously pressing CTRL+S and edit the saved HTML file with a text editor such as Notepad. However most modern web browsers today comes with developer tools (Web Inspector for Chrome & Safari, Firefly for Opera, Developer Tools for Internet Explorer) by default and that makes it even easier for us to directly edit the website live from the web browser. You can edit text, change or remove the attached images and even move the contents around the webpage.


Let’s have a walk through on how easy it is to edit the text on random.org list randomizer results page using Google Chrome.

1. First we enter 10 names in the part 1 box and then click the Randomize button.

2. Now we’ll have a list that is being randomized and the text are not editable. Move the mouse cursor over to the items, right click and select “Inspect element”. You will notice a bar being opened at the bottom of the browser showing the HTML code of the webpage.

3. Double click on the item at the bottom bar where it shows the HTML code to edit the text. As you can see, I’ve successfully changed the item number 1 from name2 to RAYMOND.CC. Now if I take a screenshot, you would have thought that it’s genuine but in fact the results has been rigged.

    

     The “Inspect element” feature in right click menu bar is immediately available at Opera and Chrome. As for Safari, you will need to enable the developer tools in Safari by turning on the Develop menu. In Safari preferences, click Advanced, then select “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. For Internet Explorer, press the F12 key will enable the Developer Tools user interface. Do take note that the Inspect Element feature at Firefox doesn’t allow you to edit text. You will need to install the Firebug extension then right click and select Inspect Element with Firebug.
There is an interesting bookmarklet which contains a short line of javascript that turns on contentEditable and designMode to enable editing of the webpage. There are some small differences between the two modes but turning both on seems to be the ultimate solution. Simply drag or save the Edit WebPage link below to your bookmark and opening this bookmarklet from your bookmarks will instantly allow you to edit any webpage live in your web browser.

Edit WebPage <- Drag this to your bookmark or save to your favorites.
Here is a video demonstration on how easy it is to manipulate random.org's results using Google Chrome.

Screenshots from computer as proof are no longer a source that can be trusted and probably video recordings would be more reliable and harder to manipulate. So if you need proof of someone doing something for you on their computer, ask for video recordings rather than screenshots. Also make sure that it doesn’t take them too long to produce the video recordings as it can be easily done with Screencast-O-Matic.

How to Target Only Internet Explorer Traffic

By Smart...

When writing pages for the Web, there are times when something displays differently in Internet Explorer than in Firefox or other Web browsers. When this happens, you have three choices: leave the differences, change the code so that it displays the same in all browsers, or use different code for different browsers. If you need to use different code for different browsers, there are two options: conditional comments or CSS hacks. Conditional comments are preferred since they are HTML valid and can be placed in any location in the document where comments can be placed.

Instructions

Conditional Comments

• 1
  Create a comment with a conditional statement and the code to be displayed if the condition is met. Internet Explorer can read these conditional comments, while other browsers ignore them as comments:
  <!--[if IE ]>
  

How to Fix a Hacked Firefox Browser

Instructions

1. • 1
     Click "Start" from the Windows desktop and click "All Programs." Click "Mozilla Firefox" to expand the contents of the Firefox folder and click "Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode)."