To help you sleep sound at night, Firefox is testing a new security tool called Firefox Monitor that will allow you to check whether if any of your accounts were included in known data breaches.
More and more people are worried about internet-related crimes, but at the same time, most Internet users have tens or hundreds of different accounts – social platforms, email services, e-commerce sites, and more – all of which have a password. Account breaches are surprisingly common, and many big platforms have been affected by one at some point. If users wanted to find out if their details had been outed in breaches, Troy Hunt started HaveIBeenPwned.com (HIBP for short). Now, Firefox has partnered with HIBP to bring a new security tool called Firefox Monitor.
Like HIBP, Firefox Monitor is “a security tool that lets users check if one of their accounts has been compromised in a data breach.” In the announcement of the tool, Peter Dolanjski explained that is is a “proposed security tool that is designed for everyone, but offers additional features for Firefox users.”
Visitors to the Firefox Monitor website can check with their email addresses to see if “if their accounts were included in known data breaches, with details on sites and other sources of breaches and the types of personal data exposed in each breach.”
Firefox Monitor will also offer recommendations on what to do in the case of a data breach, and help people secure all their accounts. At a later date, Mozilla is “also considering a service to notify people when new breaches include their personal data.”
Worried about putting your email in that field? Don’t be. Mozilla worked closely with HIBP and Cloudflare to create a method of anonymised data sharing that essentially never sends a full email address to a third party other than Mozilla. Read more about the solution here.
Next week Mozilla plans to invite 250,000 users mainly from the US to try its new security tool and then use feedback to refine it. Once “satisfied with user testing,” the company will work to make it available to all Firefox users. A release schedule is not available just yet. If you’d like to see the feature when it rolls out, you can always download the latest version of Firefox Quantum for the desktop. You will be notified when Firefox Monitor becomes available.
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