Firefox will soon warn users when they visit a previously hacked website

Mozilla teams up with Have I Been Pwned on a data breach notification feature forย Firefox

Mozilla has collaborated with the website โ€œHave I Been Pwnedย (HIBP)โ€ to notify its Firefox browser users when they visit a website that has been data breached in the past.

For those unaware, HIPBย is a popular data breach notification website that allows people to check if their login credentials such as email ID or passwords have been leaked by hackers.

Similar to โ€œthis site may be hackedโ€ warning that Google search shows for a compromised website, the new feature dubbed ‘Breach Alerts’ for Firefox will pop up notifications if a user’s credentials have been involved in a recent data breach.

โ€œThis is an addon that Iโ€™m going to be using for prototyping an upcoming feature in Firefox that notifies users when their credentials have possibly been involved in a data breach,โ€ Mozilla developerย Nihanth Subramanyaย wroteย in his GitHub repository.

โ€œI chose to make it a legacy addon to make it easy to port into Mozilla-central in the future โ€“ it will likely involve window manipulation code.โ€

Speaking to The Register, Subramanyaย said, โ€œThe feature will help expose documentation/educational information about data breaches in the Firefox UI – for example, a โ€œLearn moreโ€ link in the notification mentioned above leading to a support page.โ€

It will โ€œoffer a way for interested users to learn about and opt into a service that notifies them (e.g. via email) when they may be affected by breaches in the future.โ€

Troy Hunt, the security expert behind HIBP,ย told Engadget that they were still working on how the implementation will play out. “Firefox is just looking at which sites have been breached and we’re discussing other ways of using the data in the future. They’ve got a broad reach and surfacing this info via Firefox is a great way to get more exposure around data breaches,” Hunt said.

“Iโ€™ve been working with Mozilla on this,” Hunt told Bleeping Computer. “Weโ€™re looking at a few different models for how this might work, the main takeaway at present is that thereโ€™s an intent to surface data about oneโ€™s exposure directly within the browser,” he added.

The new feature is available as an add-on code on GitHub, whichย can be compiled by anyone and imported into Firefox. Currently, only Firefox Developer Edition is supported.

Kavita Iyer
Kavita Iyerhttps://www.techworm.net
An individual, optimist, homemaker, foodie, a die hard cricket fan and most importantly one who believes in Being Human!!!

Subscribe to our newsletter

To be updated with all the latest news

Read More

Suggested Post