How does the Push browser extension work?

The Push browser extension helps you protect against identity-based attacks in the cloud by collecting activity data from your employees' online accounts to discover and assess the security of identities and SaaS apps used across your organization — even the apps and accounts you don't already know about.

Once installed on employee browsers, the Push extension looks for logins to cloud apps that use your specified company domains (e.g. employee@example.com) or that use any domain, depending on the domain monitoring settings you configured in the Push admin console.

You'll see discovered apps and security findings populate the Push admin console as the extension observes real-time logins.

The Push extension analyzes the security of an account by performing checks for leaked, shared, reused or weak passwords; MFA usage and MFA method; capturing the login method (password, SAML, or OIDC); and others.

The extension does not store passwords or send them anywhere. It is able to perform security checks on passwords by generating a SHA256 partial hash that is salted, stored locally, and used for comparisons. These salted partial hashes are known as fingerprints.

For more details about how the Push extension securely analyzes passwords, refer to this related help article.

By collecting this data, you are able to see:

• Which SaaS platforms your employees are logging into using usernames and passwords or social logins (OIDC).

• Whether they are using strong passwords.

• Whether they are reusing passwords between SaaS accounts.

• Whether employees are sharing account credentials.

• Whether your employees are using passwords that have been exposed in a data breach, a feature powered by Have I Been Pwnd.

• Whether employees are using a password manager.

• Whether employees have registered for MFA on certain popular SaaS apps.

In addition, you can configure a list of custom terms to restrict from use in passwords, such as common company or team names that are easily guessable.

The browser extension also powers Push's app banners feature, as well as our in-browser prompts feature, currently available in early access as part of Push Labs, to nudge employees to change weak passwords at the moment of login.

Based on the information the Push browser extension collects, you can identify security issues that present a risk to your business and guide your employees to fix them using ChatOps.

Once installed, the extension sits in the background of your employees’ browsers and collects information about the apps they log into.

Learn more about the data that the Push extension collects in our documentation.

The browser extension can monitor logins to commonly used work apps based on your company email domain(s) or it can monitor all email domains an employee might use. Configure your preferred domains on the Settings page of the Push admin console.

The extension can also detect company domain logins to apps that Push may not recognize as work apps. These apps will appear in a separate list called "Other apps" in the admin console.

If your employees want to ensure even further privacy, they can create a separate work profile in their browser and install the extension there. This allows them to separate their browsing for work and personal use. The extension will never send their passwords anywhere.

When new versions of the Push browser extension are released, it automatically updates without any action required of you or your employees.