Last Updated on January 29, 2020 by Mathew Diekhake
From shopping to social media, the average online user will have hundreds of accounts requiring passwords. At the same time, the number of user data breaches occurring each year continues to rise dramatically. Understandably, people are now more worried about internet-related crimes involving personal and financial information theft than conventional crimes. In order to help keep personal information and accounts safe, we will be testing user interest in a security tool that lets users check if one of their accounts has been compromised in a data breach.
We decided to address a growing need for account security by developing Firefox Monitor, a proposed security tool that is designed for everyone, but offers additional features for Firefox users. Visitors to the Firefox Monitor website will be able to check (by entering an email address) to see 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. The site will offer recommendations on what to do in the case of a data breach, and how to help secure all accounts. We are also considering a service to notify people when new breaches include their personal data.
Partnership with HaveIBeenPwned.com
In order to create Firefox Monitor, we have partnered with HaveIBeenPwned.com (HIBP). HIBP is a valuable service, operated by Troy Hunt, one of the most renowned and respected security experts and bloggers in the world. Troy is best known for the HIBP service, which includes a database of email addresses that are known to have been compromised in data breaches. Through our partnership, Firefox is able to check your email address against the HIBP database in a private-by-design way. You can find Troy’s blog post on the partnership here.
How does it work?
It is important that we not violate our users’ privacy expectations with respect to the handling of their email address. As such, we’ve worked closely with HIBP and Cloudflare to create a method of anonymized data sharing for Firefox Monitor, which never sends your full email address to a third party, outside of Mozilla. You can read the full details of the solution here.
What will we be testing?
At this stage, we are testing initial designs of the Firefox Monitor tool in order to refine it. Beginning next week, we expect to invite approximately 250,000 users (mainly in the US) to try out the feature.
What to expect next
Once we’re satisfied with user testing, we will work on making the service available to all Firefox users. Once a release schedule has been established, it will be announced in a follow-up blog post.
In the meantime, check out and download the latest version of Firefox Quantum for the desktop in order to use the Firefox Monitor feature when it becomes available.
Download: Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux
Source: Testing Firefox Monitor, a New Security Tool – Future Releases