Firefox to warn users when visiting breached websites [source: welivesecurity]

The Firefox web browser is looking to alert visitors whenever they visit a website that is known to have suffered a data breach.

While the ‘Breach Alerts’ feature will issue a warning about a website, it won’t actually prevent users from visiting it.

“This is an extension that I’m going to be using as a vehicle for prototyping basic UI and interaction flow for an upcoming feature in Firefox that notifies users when their credentials have possibly been leaked or stolen in a data breach,” according to Nihanth Subramanya, a developer with Mozilla, the browser’s makers, writing on his GitHub repository.

The in-browser warnings, which are currently being piloted, will rely on data provided by Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP), a website that tracks data breaches and tells users if their personal details have been exposed.

Security researcher Troy Hunt, the brains behind HIBP, confirmed the reports. “Firefox is just looking at which sites have been breached and we’re discussing other ways of using the data in the future,” he is quoted as saying by Engadget. “They’ve got a broad reach and surfacing this info via Firefox is a great way to get more exposure around data breaches.”

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