Thread: searching for plaintext passwords, and wiping them

i've been updating lot of security practices on last couple days, such making use of google's multi-factor authentication, , other such things. became curious was, passwords use being stored in plaintext in various places around system? did simple recursive grep on home directory against substring of password in question, , screen flooded lines containing password clear day in history log file in .lftp folder.

immediately, ran 'shred' on file, have no need of logs, but, else on ubuntu system storing various passwords in plaintext? run

code:

grep -r / "{password here}"

seems might take forever complete.

there tools might assist me this?

using grep fast you'll get. don't think other tool match spead.

however, way can speed ignoring directories containing large files know don't contain password. example, search password way too, avoid directories ~/videos, ~/music, ~/pictures, etc because grep has no reason spend hours looking through hundreds of gigabytes of video data , like.

i'd search in ~/.config ~/.local ~/.cache /etc /var etc.

1 more tip: running grep -i flag (ignore case, password detected along password , password) makes take longer. , longer mean this:

code:

alex@kubuntu:~$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/largefile bs=1024 count=102400 102400+0 records in 102400+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 mb) copied, 38.2717 s, 2.7 mb/s alex@kubuntu:~$ time grep string < /tmp/largefile   real    0m0.186s user    0m0.172s sys     0m0.012s alex@kubuntu:~$ time grep -i string < /tmp/largefile   real    0m22.089s user    0m20.676s sys     0m0.396s

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