How to Recover Lost Firefox Passwords

Firefox users recently opened their browsers and found that all their saved passwords were gone. If this happened to you, don’t worry: your passwords are still there, no matter what they seem.

The problem, as reported by Mozilla , stems from an incompatibility between AVG’s antivirus application ( password protection ) and the new Firefox certificates released in version 67.0.2 of the browser (released a week ago). As Mozilla writes:

“The AVG team was able to identify the source of the problem in one of the AVG (password protected) features. The product protects users from the risk of stealing passwords stored in Firefox and other browsers. For Firefox, it only allows a process signed with a Firefox certificate to access the store.

We were able to identify a problem with the extension of certificate trust to all of our systems. FF 67.0.2 is signed with a new certificate valid from 05/31/2019 and the problem is most likely caused by this. We have manually fixed our internal certificate flags on our servers and updated the process for future certificate renewals (expected no later than June 4, 2020) “

To fix this, you need to take two steps. First, you need to update AVG to the latest virus definitions – at least version 19061402. You may need to restart your computer as part of the process, so make sure you save everything you do.

Then you will want to install this Firefox add-on to recover your saved passwords. If that doesn’t work for you, or if you’d rather do things manually, here are the steps the add-in repeats:

1. Click the menu button, click Help, and select Troubleshooting Information.
2. In the Application Basics section, click the Open Folder button next to the Profile Folder field.
3. Close Firefox
4. Make sure you can see the logins.json file in your profile folder. If so, rename it to logins.json.old .
5. Make sure you see the logins.json.corrupt file with the date June 2019 in your profile folder. In this case, right click on the file, copy it and rename it to logins.json .
6. Start Firefox.

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