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Today marks the official launch of Firefox Monitor, a web tool that tells you if your email address has been subject to an online data breach.
Mozilla first announced Firefox Monitor in June, and in the months that followed, the search giant tested and refined various designs.
For the new security tool, Mozilla is associated with Troy Hunt, the famous security expert behind Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP), which is a database of data breaches allowing anyone to know if any of their online accounts has been compromised.
Firefox Monitor
The first iteration of Firefox Monitor is, for all intents and purposes, a clone of HIBP. After entering your e-mail address and clicking the scan button, you are notified of the online services that have disclosed your personal information (if any). You can also register to be notified of any future data breach involving one or more of your e-mail addresses.
It is also worth noting that Firefox Monitor is not limited to Firefox – it's a web page accessible from any browser.
Above: Firefox Monitor
So what's the problem here – why bother to run a Firefox version of an existing popular database? Well, there are some probable reasons.
From HIBP's point of view, having Mozilla's weight behind him will greatly enhance the knowledge of his database. HIBP currently has a little over 2 million people registered for violation alerts, which seems a lot until you learn that there are 3.1 billion unique email addresses in the HIBP database. This means that less than 0.1% of the violated email addresses are monitored by their respective owners.
"Clearly, I'm just scratching the surface," Hunt said in a blog post announcing his partnership with Mozilla in June. "Firefox has a base of hundreds of millions of people, which greatly increases the audience that can be reached once this feature is released to the general public."
Long term
From Mozilla's point of view, strengthening its security credentials through arrangements with well-respected platforms such as HIBP can only add to its reputation. However, as we have already noted, Firefox Monitor, in its current form, is not an integration solution because it is not directly powered by the Firefox browser. Instead, it appears that Firefox Monitor is essentially a viable minimal product (MVP) on which deeper integrations can be created.
Last year, it was announced that Mozilla was working on a new offense information feature to inform Firefox users if a site they visited had already been violated. This gives an indication of the direction that Mozilla might take with Firefox Monitor – it really has to offer users real-time contextual alerts.
Mozilla is already piloting a password management tool called Firefox Lockbox, which allows users to automatically store and fill in the usernames and passwords of websites they visit. Have I been cared for? it already integrates with 1Password password manager, and it would make sense to properly integrate Firefox applications such as Firefox Lockbox into the HIBP database so that users can be notified as soon as a data breach occurs online is detected.
"Expect to see Monitor growing and appearing faster in Firefox's global system," Mozilla's Matt Grimes confirmed in a blog post.
Other similar breach detection services are in use today, demonstrating demand for such products. HackNotice was launched a few months ago on Android, iOS and the web to help users receive hacking and data breach alerts about their accounts.
It rarely seems like a day goes by without another major data breach making headlines, so it's important that the most popular channels we access the Internet strive to thwart such attacks. This is why Mozilla's incentives for data breach alerts should be welcome, even if the feature is still at a fairly early stage.
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