A couple of months ago Mozilla announced their new service called Firefox Monitor using which anyone can find out whether their email address or username has been involved in any latest data breach. Now Mozilla has decided to add this new service into Firefox browser in the form of an extension. With Firefox Monitor added as an extension in the Firefox browser, you will be notified of the data breaches as soon as you visit the affected websites.
In the latest blog entry of Mozilla, they have talked about when Firefox will show breach alerts to the users. In this blog post, they have mentioned how everything is going to work. The first stage is to update the Firefox Monitor engine to version 2.0. Once this is done, the extension will be released to all the Firefox users in the form of an update.
According to Mozilla, when you visit a website that has been affected by a data breach, you will be shown an alert about how many accounts were compromised and giving you options to check your email address through Firefox Monitor. This alert will be shown for the websites that were compromised in past 12 months. The alert will be shown for 2 months after the breached website was added to Firefox Monitor database.
If you don’t like Firefox Monitor, then it can be disabled from Firefox about:config settings by looking for the setting named extensions.fxmonitor.enabled and toggling it to false. The Firefox Monitor extension will be available only for the Firefox Quantum releases and obviously won’t work on the older releases. If you do not want to wait for the Firefox Monitor extension, then you can manually visit the Firefox Monitor website and check for data breaches yourself as we have explained in a previous post – Firefox Monitor tells when your online accounts get hacked.