Mozilla has decided to terminate its partnership with Onerep, the company behind the centralized personal data removal service that was used to build Mozilla Monitor Plus, an extension of the built-in Mozilla Monitor system in Firefox (enabled through the browser.contentblocking.report.monitor.enabled setting in about:config). This decision follows the discovery of connections between Onerep's founder and networks engaged in the search and sale of personal data. The founder of the Onerep personal data protection service had previously been involved in creating networks for collecting and selling personal data, as well as site farms for SEO optimization. Among other things, the creator of Onerep is a co-founder of the active project Nuwber, which aggregates accessible personal information and sells people reports.
Dmitry Shelest, the founder and head of Onerep, acknowledged that he had previously worked with systems for collecting and selling personal data, some of which still exist today, but stated that he has now shifted his focus exclusively to addressing information protection issues. Moreover, he believes that past involvement in personal data search projects is a strong asset for Onerep, as the knowledge and understanding gained from working on such services enable the effective creation of solutions to counter information leaks.
Dmitry admitted that he still holds a stake in the company Nuwber, which operates as a data broker, but stated that Nuwber's operations do not overlap with Onerep and that the companies do not exchange information — Onerep is an independent private company that does not engage in data sales. The information published by Krebsonsecurity also mentioned Dmitry's connection to the spam project Spamit, but he claims to have no affiliation with Spamit either in the past or present.
In February, Mozilla launched a paid service called Mozilla Monitor Plus, which utilized Onerep to track attempts to sell personal data and automatically send removal requests for user information from brokers trying to sell personal data. The service monitored over 190 websites trading personal data, including information such as full names, phone numbers, residential addresses, details about relatives and children, and criminal records. To monitor this data, users were asked to provide their first and last name, city of residence, date of birth, and email, effectively sharing their personal details with the Onerep service.
There is currently no information about the future of the Mozilla Monitor Plus project, which served as a wrapper over Onerep. The leak check form remains available on the website monitor.firefox.com, alongside the classic free service that provides alerts in case of account compromise (email check) or attempts to access a previously hacked site. The classic Mozilla Monitor checks are integrated with the database of the project haveibeenpwned.com, containing information on 13 billion accounts compromised as a result of breaches on 756 websites.
Source: opennet.ru
