'Have I Been Pwned' Now Built into Firefox, 1Password

Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), the data breach research platform built by security expert Troy Hunt, will be baked into Mozilla Firefox and 1Password so more people can check whether their information has been compromised in a data breach.

Few people know when their information is compromised in cyberattacks, especially when they hit websites users haven't accessed in years, Hunt explains in a blog post. They commonly find out via HIBP, which 100,000-200,000 people access daily to verify whether their info is affected. The site has 2M verified subscribers, 5.1 billion records, and 3.1 billion unique email addresses.

Have I Been Pwned audience is about to scale even more due to two new partnerships with Mozilla Firefox and password manager 1Password. The former gained some attention last November when HIBP announced it would be integrated into Firefox as a Breach Alert feature, which would alert visitors if the site had been involved in a breach based on data from HIBP's breach API.

Now the integration is about to get deeper. Over the next few weeks, Mozilla will begin to trial a new security tool dubbed Firefox Monitor, which gives users a tool to enter their email address and check if their accounts were compromised in known data breaches.

Firefox Monitor will run on a separate website, built for everyone but equipped with a few extra tools for Firefox users. In addition to knowing whether their data has been affected, visitors can view details on breach sources and the type of data exposed in each incident. Recommendations will help with next steps on how to react and secure accounts post-breach.

At this point, Mozilla is testing early designs of Firefox Monitor so it can address issues before a broader rollout. Starting next week, it plans to invite about 250,000 users, mostly based in the United States, to be part of the trial stage.

Hunt's partnership with 1Password goes back to 2011, he reports on his blog. In February 2018, Hunt released Pwned Passwords V2, an updated version of the Pwned Passwords service for people to see which passwords have been exposed in data breaches.

V2 came with more passwords, features, and privacy updates, and 1Password built it into their tool so anyone who used the password manager could see if their password had been compromised. Since then, 1Password has built Pwned Passwords into its Mac and Windows desktop apps. Now, it's bringing HIBP search directly into the tool itself.

Users can search HIBP directly within 1Password on the Web using the Watchtower feature. In doing so, Hunt explains, Watchtower becomes "mission control" for user accounts and introduces a new feature called "Breach Report" so people can see where data was exposed.

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