Last month, we posted about a Chrome extension and mobile app called HackNotice that is able to alert you about various data leaks and hack attacks. And now Mozilla has also started a similar service called Firefox Monitor that can tell you if your online accounts have been part of a large hack attack or data dump. Just like HackNotice, Firefox Monitor can also alert you automatically when your email addresses are found among such hacked data dumps.
Firefox Monitor makes it very easy for you to find out if any of your online accounts that use a particular email address have been involved in any data breach. All you have to do is visit the Firefox Monitor website and enter the email address associated with your online accounts followed by clicking on the Scan button.
It will instantly display all the incidents of data breaches that involved your email address. For each of the entries, it shows the service or product name (e.g., Dropbox), the data breach date, the number of accounts that were compromised, and the type of data that was compromised (e.g., usernames, passwords, email addresses etc). Your email address is not stored by Mozilla.
Firefox Monitor is not only about informing users about the data breaches from the past in which their accounts were possibly involved. But it also provides a service that can alert you as soon as some new data breach information is made public. For these alerts you have to sign-up for the Firefox Monitor service. It will send you a complete report on your compromised accounts and will notify you any time your accounts appear in the new data breaches. In the alert service, you can add as many email addresses as you want to be monitored.
It also shows you some basic information about what you should do if you find that your accounts appear in the data breaches. For example, you can change the account passwords, change security settings for the account, change the password recovery information, and possibly use two-step verification for extra security.
You can find more about Firefox Monitor at https://monitor.firefox.com/.