Mozilla's Firefox Monitor tells you if your accounts have been compromised

Updated September 25, 2018: Firefox Monitor is now available to everyone after its initial round of testing. To get started, you can head to monitor.firefox.com. The original story follows.

If all of the data breaches hitting the news over the past several years have you worried, Mozilla is working on a tool that will help you keep an eye on your accounts. Called Firefox Monitor, the website will allow you to check your email addresses against a database of known breaches to see if any of your personal data has been exposed.

To get the ball rolling, Mozilla has partnered with HaveIBeenPwned.com (HIBP), which operates a database of email addresses that have been found to have been compromised in data breaches. Firefox Monitor will work by checking the email address you enter against the HIBP database in a secure way. According to Mozilla, it has worked with HIBP and Cloudflare to ensure any data shared with Firefox Monitor is anonymized and your full email address is never shared with any companies other than Mozilla.

From Mozilla:

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.

Mozilla says that Firefox Monitor is designed to be used by everyone, but it will offer "additional features" for Firefox users, though it's unclear what those added features will be at the moment.

The tool isn't yet ready for primetime, but Mozilla is gearing up to begin a test next week with around 250,000 people. Should testing go well, Firefox Monitor will be enabled for all Firefox users at a later date.

See Firefox at Mozilla

Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl