Firefox is bringing Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) to the masses.
If you’re not familiar with HIBP, it’s an excellent security tool, developed by Troy Hunt, which lets you quickly check if any of your online accounts have been compromised in a data breach.
Related: Internet security privacy guide
HIBP currently has around two million subscribers, and through partnerships with Mozilla and 1Password, Hunt is planning to push it out to a lot more people.
Mozilla has announced it will soon launch a site called Firefox Monitor, which will “check your email address against the HIBP database in a private-by-design way”. You can find out more about the technical elements here.
Firefox Monitor will be available to use from next week, though it will initially only be available to around 250,000 Firefox users.
“Once we’re satisfied with user testing, we will work on making the service available to all Firefox users,” the company wrote. It is also considering rolling out “a service to notify people when new breaches include their personal data”.
1Password users, on the other hand, can already take advantage of the partnership. “As of now, you can search HIBP from directly within 1Password via the Watchtower feature in the web version of the product,” Hunt explained in a blog post.
If you’ve never tried 1Password before, you can sign up for a free trial here.
“2 million [subscribers] is more than I ever expected, if I’m honest, but it’s also only a tiny, tiny drop in the ocean,” said Hunt.
“Of the 5.1 billion records that are in HIBP today, there’s 3.1B unique email addresses. I’m reaching 0.06% of them via the notification service and not a whole lot more in terms of people coming to the site and doing an ad hoc search (usually 100k – 200k people a day).
“Don’t get me wrong – I’m enormously happy and personally fulfilled by having been able to do even this – but clearly, I’m barely scratching the surface. However, that scope is about to expand dramatically [via the two new partnerships].”
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
