Just because you’re doing your best to protect all your online accounts against hackers looking to steal your credentials for sensitive online services, it doesn’t mean they’ll stop. In most cases they’re not even targeting you, going directly for the online services you’re a customer of.
Thankfully, there’s one service that tells you whether your accounts may have been compromised during any of the publicly disclosed breaches, and services like Mozilla’s Firefox browser and the 1Password password management app will soon incorporate that clever security service.
We talked many times about Have I Been Pwned (HIPB), a free online tool built by security expert Troy Hunt. It’s a tool that lets you enter an email address to figure out whether hackers may have pawned related credentials in any of the massive hacks that were disclosed to the world.
Both Firefox and 1Password will include HIBP in their products, the companies announced. Mozilla said in a blog post that HIBP will be built right into a future version of the Firefox browser.
The security feature is called Firefox Monitor, and it’ll be available to about a quarter of a million US users at first. The company insists that the new functionality will protect your privacy in addition to telling you whether you’ve been hacked:
It is important that we not violate our users’ privacy expectations with respect to the handling of their email address. As such, we’ve worked closely with HIBP and Cloudflare to create a method of anonymized data sharing for Firefox Monitor, which never sends your full email address to a third party, outside of Mozilla
Agile Bits, the company behind 1Password, made a similar announcement.
The 1Password Watchtower service will tell you whether you’ve been hacked with the help of the same HIBP service. Once a security issue is detected, a Breach Report will be provided to the user, complete with fix suggestions.
Agile Bits also says that the Breach Report feature works without 1Password sharing any personal data with HIBP. Here’s how it’s supposed to work — a more detailed explanation is available at this link.:
Watchtower will be available initially on 1Password.com, with the 1Password desktop apps supposed to get it soon.
