Mozilla has decided to terminate its partnership with Onerep, which is developing a service for centralized removal of personal data, on the basis of which the Mozilla Monitor Plus product was built, expanding the capabilities of the Mozilla Monitor system built into Firefox (enabled through the browser.contentblocking.report.monitor.enabled setting in about:config). The decision was made after the discovery of the connection between the founder of Onerep and networks involved in the search and sale of personal data. The founder of the personal data protection service Onerep in the past participated in the creation of networks for the collection and sale of personal data, as well as site farms for SEO optimization. Among other things, the creator of Onerep is a co-founder of the ongoing Nuwber project, which aggregates available personal information and sells reports on people.
Dmitry Shelest, the creator and head of Onerep, admitted that in the past he was involved in systems for collecting and selling personal data, some of which still exist, but said that he has now switched exclusively to solving issues related to information security. Moreover, he believes that past participation in projects to search for personal data is Onerep’s strength, since the knowledge and understanding of the inner workings gained in the process of working on such services allows us to effectively create solutions to counteract information leakage.
Dmitry admitted that he still has a stake in Nuwber, which operates as a data broker, but stated that Nuwber’s activities do not overlap with Onerep and the companies do not exchange information - Onerep is an independent private company that does not sell data. The information published by Krebsonsecurity also mentioned Dmitry’s connection with the spammer project Spamit, but he claims that he is not affiliated with Spamit in any way in the past or at present.
In February, Mozilla introduced a paid service called Mozilla Monitor Plus, which used Onerep to track attempts to sell personal data and automatically send requests to remove user information from the websites of brokers trying to sell personal data. The service monitored more than 190 sites that traded personal data, including information such as full names, telephone numbers, residential addresses, information about relatives and children, and criminal records. As initial data for monitoring, it was proposed to enter first and last name, city of residence, date of birth and email, i.e. transfer your personal data to the Onerep service.
There is no word yet on the future of the Mozilla Monitor Plus project, which was a wrapper on top of Onerep. The leak check form remains available on monitor.firefox.com for now, in addition to the classic free service that provides a warning if an account is compromised (check by email) or an attempt is made to log into a previously hacked site. Checking in the classic Mozilla Monitor is carried out through integration with the database of the haveibeenpwned.com project, which includes information about 13 billion accounts stolen as a result of hacking of 756 sites.
Source: opennet.ru