Mozilla's Firefox Monitor security tool checks if your accounts have been compromised by hackers

Mozilla's Firefox Monitor security tool checks if your accounts have been compromised by hackers

Despite the prevalence of hacks and data breaches in the news recently, few people ever find out if their information has been released or taken advantage of unless there is a noticeable problem. Just last year, more than 179 million records were exposed in the U.S.

Mozilla is hoping to change that by teaming with Troy Hunt -- a renowned Australian digital security expert who runs HaveIBeenPwned.com -- to create Firefox Monitor. The website HaveIBeenPwned.com allows you to search for your email address to see whether it has been involved in a data breach, giving you the date, breached company, and amount of data stolen. The website also gives a description of the hack your email was involved in and suggests ways to move forward.

Have I been pwned?

"Over the coming weeks, Mozilla will begin trialling integration between HIBP and Firefox to make breach data searchable via a new tool called 'Firefox Monitor'," Hunt wrote in a blog post about the partnership.

"This is major because Firefox has an install base of hundreds of millions of people which significantly expands the audience that can be reached once this feature rolls out to the mainstream."

HaveIBeenPwned.com currently has a secure database of 5.1 billion records, with 3.1 billion unique email addresses, yet only a bit more than 2 million subscribers. The more people that take advantage of the pwned website, the more people will be able to secure their accounts and make it safer for everyone, including the websites involved in the original hack.

"Understandably, people are now more worried about internet-related crimes involving personal and financial information theft than conventional crimes. In order to help keep personal information and accounts safe, we will be testing user interest in a security tool that lets users check if one of their accounts has been compromised in a data breach," Mozilla wrote in its announcement of the deal. 

Check for a privacy breach

"Visitors to the Firefox Monitor website will be able to check (by entering an email address) to see if their accounts were included in known data breaches, with details on sites and other sources of breaches and the types of personal data exposed in each breach. The site will offer recommendations on what to do in the case of a data breach, and how to help secure all accounts," they said adding that they were working on another feature that would let users know when their information was involved in a data breach.

Mozilla and HaveIBeenPwned.com initially announced a partnership last fall that saw the web browser add an alert that would notify users when they were visiting a website that had recently been involved in a data breach.

Hunt also secured a deal with 1Password, a password management app, in February that allows users to search if their email or password had been released in a data breach.

Both Hunt and Mozilla wrote extensively about the security concerns people may have with the database and entering their email addresses into the service. They employ a detailed strategy that makes it nearly impossible to use or even identify the email addresses in their database.

According to Mozilla, Firefox Monitor will begin testing next week, with 250,000 mostly U.S.-based users invited to join the trial period.

Mozilla Firefox since the end of last year has put protecting its users privacy and personal data at the top of its list. Firefox lets you create and manage strong passwords with an easy-to-use password manager that can handle credit card and other login information. The Firefox browser also includes tools that block websites from tracking your online activities. You can also extend Firefox's usefulness through browser extensions that let you harden your browser's security.

*This article was featured on Download.com on June 26, 2018: https://download.cnet.com/blog/download-blog/mozillas-firefox-monitor-security-tool-checks-if-your-accounts-have-been-compromised-by-hackers/

Baltimore emergency 911 dispatch hacked, taken offline for 17 hours →

The cyberattack slowed emergency response times as dispatchers had to resort to manual methods.

Government officials in Baltimore recently confirmed that their emergency dispatch system was infiltrated by unknown hackers around 8 am on Sunday, forcing the city to shut the entire system down and handle emergency calls manually for nearly 17 hours.

The office of Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh confirmed the hack yesterday and the city's CIO, Frank Johnson, told the Baltimore Sun that instead of emergency calls being "being relayed to dispatchers electronically, they were relayed by call center support staff manually."

Hackers breached the city's CAD system, which manages 911 and 311 calls, and city officials quickly took the affected server offline, Johnson told the Baltimore Sun. City officials didn't comment in detail on the situation, although they confirmed that the police department and the FBI became involved almost immediately. The system was eventually restored at 2 am on Monday.

The story of what happened in Baltimore gained prominence this week as Atlanta also struggled with a similar but even more widespread hacking event, as reported by our sister site ZDNet.

Since Thursday, all of Atlanta's government computers were shut down during a ransomware attack by notorious hacking group SamSam. Just last year, the group hacked into the Dallas emergency system and set off tornado sirens, according to the New York Times.

In Atlanta this weekend, the group demanded a $51,000 payment in Bitcoin in exchange for releasing all of the government's files and threatened to destroy them if they weren't paid. Details on the resolution are murky due to the ongoing government investigation, but Atlanta city officials were able to use their computers again on Tuesday, the Times reported. At a press conference, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms called the multi-day hack a "hostage situation."

Law enforcement officials across the country have been raising the alarm about possible cyberattacks to government entities, highlighting the fact that hackers have been upping the ante against hospitals and emergency services, believing them to be the parts of government that can least afford to be down for long periods of time.

CIOs in a number of states said in a 2016 ICMA survey that local governments needed to prioritize cybersecurity like any other service, due to the rapidly rising number of attacks.

"The survey...found that about one-quarter of local governments reported that they were experiencing attacks of one kind or another, successful or not, at least as often as once an hour," the New York Times wrote. But they added that only about a third of local governments had a detailed plan to handle hacking situations.

"A smart local government will have fire, police and cybersecurity at the same level," David Jordan, CISO for Arlington County, VA, told the New York Times.

*this article was featured on the Tech Republic website on March 28, 2018: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/baltimore-emergency-911-dispatch-hacked-taken-offline-for-17-hours/