Update: Ever wonder if your personal information has been stolen in a data breach? Mozilla is making it easy to find out.
The browser maker has officially launched Firefox Monitor, a free service it first announced in June that notifies you if your information has been part of a data breach.
"After testing this summer, the results and positive attention gave us the confidence we needed to know this was a feature we wanted to give to all of our users," Vice President of Firefox Product Nick Nguyen wrote in a Tuesday blog post.
Just visit the site, enter your email address, and press Scan. The service will then scan your email against security expert Troy Hunt's "Have I Been Pwned" database, and let you know if your information has been involved in a publicly known 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," Nguyen wrote.
You can also sign up to be notified about future breaches. That way, the next time a breach rolls around, Firefox will send you an email if you're affected.
"If you're wondering about how we're handling your email address, rest assured we will protect your email address when it's scanned," Nguyen wrote.
Original Story (6/26):
Because ignorance isn't always bliss, Mozilla and 1Password are making it a lot easier to find out if your personal information has been compromised in a security breach.Mozilla's new Firefox Monitor tool lets people check their email addresses against the popular Have I Been Pwned data breach database. Meanwhile, password manager 1Password has integrated Have I Been Pwned into its Watchtower service on the web.
"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," Mozilla's Peter Dolanjski explained in a blog post. "The site will offer recommendations on what to do in the case of a data breach, and how to help secure all accounts."
At this point, Mozilla is testing designs as it prepares to make the tool available to all Firefox users. It plans to invite approximately 250,000 users, mostly in the US, to trial the feature, starting next week.
In a Tuesday blog post, Have I Been Pwned creator and security expert Troy Hunt said the Firefox integration "is major."
"Firefox has an install base of hundreds of millions of people which significantly expands the audience that can be reached once this feature rolls out to the mainstream," he wrote.
Meanwhile on 1Password, Have I Been Pwned is powering a new feature called The Breach Report, which shows a list of websites where your email address was compromised (even if your don't have any information about that site in 1Password), and offers advice on securing your accounts. 1Password users can try out this new feature right now.
It comes after 1Password in February introduced a feature that lets you check if a password you chose has been previously exposed in a data breach.