Mozilla has recently launched Firefox Monitor, a service without any charge and completely free, to notify individuals concerned about their privacy in case of a data breach. The service has been built in partnership with an Australian Web security expert Troy Hunt. The service allows people to check if their email address has been part of any kind of data breach. For the initial testing, Mozilla notably invited lakhs of users and got “positive attention” for the final and last product. The service by Firefox utilizes Have I Been Pwned’s API endpoints to enable the functioning of data breach monitoring.
Mozilla’s Firefox Monitor is much like Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned site which allows you to easily find if your email address has been a part of any data breach. It provides an email address bar to find out if there was any data breach for your email through a basic scan. Mozilla says that the email being entered will be stored during the basic scan. Moreover, you can easily sign up by using one of your active email addresses to avail a full report on your compromised email accounts and to receive notifications about any new data breach.
The service by Firefox Monitor avails the service of Have I Been Pwned that maintains a database of email that was accessed during a data breach. Whenever the service detects the given email address or any personal information related to that email address was accessed during any publicly known data breach in the past, it will notify the same to you. “If you’re wondering about how we’re handling your email address, rest assured we will protect your email address when it’s scanned,” Mozilla said in a blog post.
From an expert view, it is highly recommended to change the password that has been linked to the email address found with the Firefox Monitor service to protect it from hackers completely. And along with that, you should never share your any of your credentials on any third-party service or website.
If you were to access the same service through Have I Been Pwned website, the experience may look similar to the one offered by Mozilla platform, but Mozilla has got larger exposure due to the brand name.
The service may go well with the large users of Firefox to check out if their email addresses and personal information were not a part of the recent data breaches.
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