Mozilla's Firefox Monitor Can Now Alert Users If Their Accounts Have Been Hacked

Mozilla’s Firefox Monitor was announced earlier this year as an experimental tool that lets people know if any of their online accounts have been hacked. Now, Mozilla is launching Firefox Monitor as an official service that lets users sign up for free and get alerts if their account has been hacked or has become victim to a data breach.

“Data breaches, when information like your username and password are stolen from a website you use, are an unfortunate part of life on the internet today. It can be hard to keep track of when your information has been stolen, so we’re going to help by launching Firefox Monitor, a free service that notifies people when they’ve been part of a data breach,” Mozilla said in a blog post.

To use the new service, users will have to go to monitor.firefox.com. On the website, users will simply have to enter their email address to see if it has been hacked or not. Mozilla is able to do this through its partnership with “Have I Been Pwned,” which has a vast database containing emails that have been affected by data breaches.

Mozilla is using hash range query API endpoints to ensure that the user’s email address isn’t shared to third parties when entering an email address on the website, according to Engadget. If Mozilla’s service finds that the user’s email has been compromised in any way, it will advise the user to change his or her password immediately.

“We’ll let you know if your email address and/or personal info was involved in a publicly known past data breach. Once you know where your email address was compromised you should change your password and any other place where you’ve used that password,” Mozilla said.

The new tool doesn’t really stop hacking or data breaches, but at least users will now have a tool that explicitly tells them if they should worry about their accounts. The Firefox Monitor website now has a Sign Up button at the bottom of the page. Users can enter their email address there and they will be able to get alerts when their accounts appear in new data breaches.

“Firefox Monitor is just one of many things we’re rolling out this Fall to help people stay safe while online,” Mozilla said. “Recently, we announced our roadmap to anti-tracking and in the next couple of months, we’ll release more features to arm and protect people’s rights online.”