Firefox Will Alert You If You Visit A Breached Website

Author - Nov 16, 2018

Mozille Firefox is going to notify its users whenever they are about to enter a recently breached site which can affect their data privacy.

Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has been showing that the company cares about the safety of its users on the Internet. Earlier this year, they announced Firefox Monitor, a service that can tell its users if their online accounts were hacked in recent data breaches or alerting them if their accounts will appear in any breaches in the future. All they need to do is giving it is their email addresses and it will use the Have I Been Pwned database to show them if they need to worry and what data of them was compromised. Today, the company strengthens its protection by announcing that it will alert its users whenever they get on a website that has recently impacted by a breach.

Users will get notification similar to this if they enter a recent breached site

To be more specific, if you are visiting a website that has been breached within the last 12 months or so, Firefox will notify you by popping up a notification. And Mozilla is fully aware of the fact that popping a lot of notifications will annoy pretty much most of its users.

Therefore, they promise that the notification will only appear one per website. After popping the initial notification, the Mozilla browser will repeat the alert only if you are visiting a website that was just added to the breached sites’ database within 2 months. If you find those notifications annoying and do not bother much about getting data breaches, you are allowed to opt out completely.

HIBP (Have I Been Pwned), which just integrated with Firefox early 2018, will be the partner that provides Mozilla the breached site database. It is also an extension of the Firefox Monitor service of Mozilla. Besides the notification for Firefox on desktops, which is going to be released within a few weeks, the Firefox maker also offered Firefox Monitor in 26 languages.

Mozilla revealed that their idea to make this feature is to help users to be aware that the websites they often visit are not always secure when it comes to their data.

While this notification can be really useful, Mozilla still says that this is only a temporary solution and they are currently working to make a better system.