What Is Firefox Monitor and Should You Trust Its Warnings?

Account security is probably one of the hottest issues in the cybersecurity world right now. Major browsers are trying their best to secure their user experience, and each of them comes up with unique features. To make sure that the desktop browser client accounts are not breached, Firefox employs Firefox Monitor.

In this entry, we will introduce you to this feature, and we will look at the reasons you should take the warnings by Firefox Monitor seriously. Should you have any further questions about the matter at the end of this description, please do not hesitate to drop us a comment.

What is Firefox Monitor?

One of the most important aspects of a safe account is your email address. No matter where you want to sign up, you definitely need an email address to confirm your account. More often than not, your email works as your login or your username, too.

Unfortunately, emails are also probably the most vulnerable part of the cybersecurity chain because they get compromised quite often. Ironically, the more often you use a certain email to sign up on various sites, the bigger is the chance that the emails could get leaked if the site's database experiences a data theft.

When your emails get leaked, they can be used for spam campaigns, they can be used to create new accounts, they can even be used for malware distribution purposes. It all depends on how the criminals decide to utilize the data they have stolen. And here, you might ask, what does Firefox Monitor have anything to do with this?

Well, Firefox Monitor is a service with more than 2 million subscribers, and this service is there to let you know whether any of your accounts have been compromised. In a sense, the idea behind the service is similar to Have I Been Pwned. In fact, the creator of the website is said to have helped Mozilla improve and spread the Firefox Monitor service. All you have to do is access the Firefox Monitor website, and enter your email address to see if you've been part of an online data breach.

Firefox Monitor Email Alert

It is also possible to sign up for breach monitoring with a Firefox account. This sign up allows you to stay alert to new breaches, monitor several emails, and protect your online privacy. With the registration, you can expect to receive a Firefox Monitor email alert if your registered email appears in the new data breaches. It sure is a lot more convenient than just checking your email manually every single time. Also, it is very likely that Firefox Monitor email alert will be issued almost immediately the data breach is detected, so it would save you time, and give you an edge to do something about your account's security.

Firefox Monitor Security Tips

Like most of the services that deal with personal data thefts and personal data security breaches, Firefox Monitor also issues a number of security tips that should help you protect yourself from hackers. We are sure that you have encountered similar security tips on other websites that deal with cyber safety. However, it is never too much when it comes to your effort to protect your personal data. Therefore, we would like to go through certain points of the security tips offered by Firefox Monitor.

The first thing you have to realize is that no information is useless. We usually imagine that hackers target only government or financial institutions because they tend to have more valuable information, but even personal data can be sold on the dark-net, and it means that you shouldn't put your guard down, shouldn't share your email address to the left and to the right.

Aside from that, passwords are extremely important when it comes to protecting your accounts from a security breach. If you wonder whether your passwords are strong, you can check the list of the worst passwords we have covered before. If your passwords are there, you most definitely need to change them. Also, reusing passwords is a bad idea. We do understand that reusing passwords is convenient, and you do not have to remember multiple character strings. However, if you use one password across several different accounts, cracking that one password would mean that hackers get access to multiple accounts.

If by any chance, you receive the Firefox Monitor email alert that your data has been breached, you have to check which account has been breached. If the account belongs to a financial or another service that manages extremely sensitive information, you have to inform them about it immediately. After that, you must change your password.

It might look that changing your password post factum wouldn't help much, but it's the least you can do to improve your account's security. Once again, please refer to the list of the worst passwords to avoid coming up with something like that again. A strong and unique password has to have numerals, capital and lower case letters, and special symbols. Needless to say, the symbol string has to be random because it is harder to guess.

Coming up with a random string of symbols all by yourself can be definitely challenging. It's not like you can do a keyboard smash every time you need to create a new password. Not to mention, you need strong and unique passwords for all of your accounts. So what do you do? You can actually use a free password manager tool that will help you generate new passwords, and it will store it for you in its vault. What's more, the password manager will also renew your passwords regularly, as that is also a very important security tip.

Finally, if the account allows you to, you should consider enabling multi-factor or two-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication relies on temporary or unique tokens that only the owner of the account has for a limited period of time. The most common example of a multi-factor authentication token would be a temporary passcode that users receive through a text message. If you do that and you subscribe to the Firefox Monitor, you can be sure that your accounts acquire a whole different layer of security.