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Firefox Monitor Will Inform You of Data Breaches (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the good-moves dept.

Earlier this year, Mozilla announced Firefox Monitor, a service that will inform you if your online accounts were hacked in a recent data breach. It's now available to general public. A report adds: For the new security-focused tool, Mozilla partnered with Troy Hunt, the renowned security expert behind Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP), which is a database of data breaches that allows anyone to discover whether one of their online accounts has been compromised. The first iteration of Firefox Monitor is, for all intents and purposes, a clone of HIBP. After you enter your email address and hit the scan button, you're told which online services have leaked your personal details (if any). You can also sign up to be notified of any future data breaches involving one or more of your email addresses.

2 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. If you don't use Firefox... by The+Original+CDR · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try Have I Been Pwned website to check your email address against known data breaches.

    1. Re:If you don't use Firefox... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Since you didn't read TFA...

      It is also worth noting here that Firefox Monitor isn’t actually restricted to Firefox — it‘s a web page that can be accessed from any browser.

      So, why even bother?

      So what is the deal here — why bother launching a Firefox-branded version of an existing popular database? Well, there are a couple of likely reasons.

      From HIBP’s perspective, having the weight of Mozilla behind it will significantly boost awareness of its database. HIBP currently has just over 2 million people signed up for breach alerts, which sounds like a lot until you learn that there are 3.1 billion unique email addresses in the HIBP database. This means less than 0.1 percent of breached email addresses are being monitored by their respective owners.

      and

      From Mozilla’s perspective, bolstering its security credentials through tie-ups with well-respected platforms such as HIBP can only add to its reputation. However, as noted already, Firefox Monitor in its current guise isn’t much of an integration because it doesn’t really feed directly into the Firefox browser. Instead, it appears Firefox Monitor as it stands is essentially a minimal viable product (MVP) upon which deeper integrations can be created.

      Finally,

      Mozilla is already piloting a password management tool called Firefox Lockbox, which enables users to store and auto-complete usernames and passwords for websites they visit. Have I Been Pwned? already integrates with password manager 1Password, and it would make a great deal of sense to properly integrate Firefox applications such as Firefox Lockbox with the HIBP database so that users can be informed the moment an online data breach is detected.