- Feb 4, 2016
- 2,520
source (bleepingcomputer.com): Firefox Will Warn Users When Visiting Sites That Suffered a Data Breach
Mozilla engineers are working on a notifications system for Firefox that shows a security warning to users visiting sites that have suffered data breaches.
The notifications system will use data provided by Have I Been Pwned?, a website that indexes public data breaches and allows users to search and see if their details have been compromised in any of these incidents.
Code for this feature currently available as an add-on
Work on this project has only recently started. The code to show these warnings is not even in the Firefox codebase but managed separately as an add-on.
"[Breach Alerts] is an addon that I'm going to be using for prototyping an upcoming feature in Firefox that notifies users when their credentials have possibly been involved in a data breach," said Mozilla engineer Nihanth Subramanya in the add-on's description.
The code of this add-on is available on GitHub, and anyone can compile it and import it into Firefox. Only Firefox Developer Edition is currently supported.
The add-on is in early stages of development, and the warnings are rough on the edges. Currently, they trigger when the user visits a site included in Have I Been Pwned's list of public data breaches.
The alert also includes an input field. In the add-ons current version this field doesn't do anything, but we presume it's there to allow users to search and see if their data was exposed during that site's security breach.
