Mozilla highlights built-in Firefox protections for cybersecurity month

October once again marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and Mozilla is taking advantage of the moment to remind people that staying safe online doesn’t have to cost extra money or require signing up for a dozen different app subscriptions.

The campaign focuses on this year’s official cybersecurity theme, “Don’t Make It Easy for Them”, which has been promoted by the National Cybersecurity Alliance and CISA. Mozilla notes that many people fail to carry out basic online security measures because “I don’t have the time or the money to invest in it right now”, and therefore decided to go over the security protections that Firefox offers right from the start for free.

All of this isn’t exactly anything new if you keep up with browser news, but putting all the points together serves as a clear reminder. Mozilla introduced several privacy enhancements over the summer, and this latest set of improvements builds on that progress.

To begin with, there is a built-in VPN proxy which provides 50 GB of free encrypted browsing traffic each month so as to hide your IP address when you’re using public Wi-Fi. It first appeared on desktop systems this spring before being made available for Android in July. The protection applies only to browser traffic and not to the entire phone or laptop, but for ordinary daily browsing this amount is more than sufficient.

Firefox Relay also lets you use a masked email address for newsletter signups and random websites, with up to 50 free masks that forward messages to your real inbox. Should a dubious site suffer a breach at a later stage, you simply discard the mask and leave your primary address untouched.

Apart from the use of masks and proxy routing, standard features such as the password generator, sync, and tracker blockers operate automatically in the background.

Mozilla has been making gradual adjustments to these areas, and we even reported on the fact that they are testing security settings that will block extensions on particular websites so that private banking pages remain isolated. This all follows shortly after the browser underwent a visual refresh with the Firefox 157 update.

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