Hackers are increasingly targeting our inbox, here's how to defend yourself thanks to the new Mozilla Firefox Monitor tool
Computer security is one of the aspects to take to heart when using the Internet. To protect our data, it's especially important to pay attention to our email inboxes, where we share bank data, confidential information and work documents.
It's no coincidence that hackers mostly target users' email inboxes. Also because they often contain access links or passwords to all the services we are subscribed to. Without forgetting that by using our mailbox they can send malware or computer scams to all our contacts who will trust us because they don't know that behind those messages there are not us but a cyber criminal. Often it is very difficult for a user to understand if the e-mail account has been hacked, because the malicious ones act in the shadows and try not to be detected. Luckily, however, there is a simpler system to understand if our e-mail, and our web accounts in general, have been hacked: Mozilla Firefox Monitor.
How Mozilla Firefox Monitor works
Using the Mozilla website to understand if our mailbox is safe or not is very easy. Once connected to the Mozilla Firefox Monitor page we enter our email. The tool will run a scan and inform us if our email address is compromised or not. If it sounds familiar and seems like the same service as the Have I Been Pwned portal, it's because Mozilla has collaborated with the developers of that project. It is also possible to receive instant notifications in case of a breach of one of our profiles associated with email.
For example, if our email or social profile credentials were to be stolen by a group of hackers and put up for sale on the dark web, Mozilla Monitor would send us a message to notify us of the incident and have time to go on the "counter-attack". That is, change passwords not only to the hacked mailbox or social profile, but also to the other accounts we use. It is no coincidence that in addition to the possibility of checking your accounts, the Mozilla Firefox Monitor website also provides some suggestions related to passwords. Among them for example we find the use of a password manager, that is, an app that creates and remembers passwords for us, or the adoption of two-factor authentication and finally the use of different passwords for each account, as we have already pointed out.