I recently had an online security service that I subscribe to advise me that a password of mine, beginning with U5xxxxxxx, has been found on the dark web. I don’t believe that vault searches in Bitwarden include passwords. Can anyone verify that for me, and if that’s true, does anyone have any hints are far as finding out what the password is for? I’ve been writing down/keeping my passwords for the past 25 years, and no have them all in Bitwarden. But I can’t seem to come up with a password that starts with U5xxxxxxx and don’t know what to try next.
To my knowledge, you cannot search for passwords within the Bitwarden vault. However, if you have an encrypted drive or virtual drive, you could export your vault in plain text as a CSV file and search on that.You just need to be REALLY careful with unencrypted password files because even if you delete them, they are easily recovered by anyone relatively tech savvy, e.g., if your computer is stolen.
Hey, even in 2025, there’s still no direct or truly secure way of solving this issue. There isn’t a search-to-password feature, and having to download an unencrypted file containing all our credentials is inherently risky.
The safest* and most practical approach is to download that file within a sandbox or a virtual machine. By working in a completely isolated environment, you can open and use the file without exposing your main system to potential threats. Once you’re done, simply close off or delete that VM/sandbox instance. This drastically reduces the risk of credential leaks or malware infections, since nothing persists outside the isolated session.
*Of course, nothing is 100% secure, but this method is a major step up from just downloading sensitive files directly to your main device.
In addition to Export to CSV or JSON (as mentioned above), premium users can create a dummy entry with the password in question and then use the reused passwords report to find other vault entries that share a password with the dummy entry.