When you register for an online account, they usually ask for your basic details like your email and later on, you have to set a password. This is usually sensitive information and it is necessary that the security engineers of the Internet company keep this data safe for its users.
However, breaches happen and this results to tonnes of data being leaked by hackers for sale in the dark web. This is bad for the company and for the users alike and that is why companies invest a lot in their online security.
We have seen quite a number of breaches in the past like the famous LinkedIn and Yahoo hacks where the latter affected 3 billion accounts! Information like this is leaked to the dark web and has been indexed by the likes of Have I been pwned.
Information about the sites that have been breached before is not widely known and the best place to know such information is in a browser. Now thanks to Mozilla, we will be able to know this via their famous browser, Firefox.
Mozilla is working on a notifications system for Firefox which will show a warning to users when they visit sites that have suffered data breaches. The data used for the notifications system will be provided by Have I Been Pwned which has allowed people to search whether their details has been compromised.
There is an add-on you can add that is available on GitHub that you can use to import into Firefox to enable this feature. Sadly only Firefox Developer. The add-on is on its early stages of development and it might have some bugs.
“This is an extension that I’m going to be using as a vehicle for prototyping basic UI and interaction flow for an upcoming feature in Firefox that notifies users when their credentials have possibly been leaked or stolen in a data breach,” it says on the add-on’s summary page on Github.
This is indeed a useful feature and we hope that it becomes standard in all the browsers that we currently use.
