In the News
Knowing if your accounts have been hacked just got easier. In Mozilla’s Firefox Monitor Will Now Alert You When One of Your Accounts Was Hacked, Frederic Lardinois from TechCrunch discusses a new service from Firefox Monitor which provides users with information about their hacked accounts and the information exposed. Lardinois states that this new service serves as a precaution for future hacks and allows users to set an alert for if they ever do get hacked. Lardinois explains that this new service was created in response to customer concerns over future hacks and security breaches.
Our Take
With the quantity of accounts that the average person has, a service such as Firefox Monitor can act a preventative and proactive measure to ensure that and when one of your accounts is hacked, you can act in a timely fashion to minimize damage and largescale data exposure. Having the knowledge of whether or not one of your accounts have been hacked is incredibly important especially if accounts contain highly personal or sensitive information. Although it is not recommended, many users still use passwords that are far too easily hacked or reuse passwords on multiple accounts, which makes multiple accounts vulnerable if one is breached. Creating a strong, unique passwords for every account and change them periodically is vital to securing your accounts. Services such as Firefox Monitor can act to minimize damage when it does happen.
Recommendations
How can you protect your accounts and your personal information?
- Do not share passwords between accounts
- Use a passwords manager….
- Understand the risks of putting your personal information into the world, and only share what you have to
- Minimize the number of accounts that have direct access to your bank account or card numbers
- Add security safeguards, such as multi-factor authentication and alerting, to accounts as necessary to prevent fraudulent transactions from occurring.
- Stay up to date on news regarding recent fraud and phishing attacks to see if you may have been affected