The feature, still in a very primitive stage, is designed to notify Firefox users about data breaches. For instance, a notification could be triggered when a user visits a site that is acknowledged to have recently been breached. Have I Been Pwned’s list of known data breaches will be used as the source for hacked sites?
Other goals of the plan include educating users about data breaches, for instance, providing a “Learn more” link beside the breach notification and offering users a way to opt into a service that would tell them via e-mail when they may be harmed by a breach.
Troy Hunt, the security researcher back Have I Been Pwned, established the development on Twitter, saying that they are doing some “awesome things” with Mozilla.
As I stated, the project is in a very early stage but you can test it out now if you’d like by taking the requisite code over on GitHub. It’s currently given as an add-on although it sounds as if the functionality will ultimately be baked into a standard release of Mozilla. No word yet on when that’ll happen although, given the current iteration, I suspect it’ll still be a while.
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