Proton Mail offers monitoring of the dark web for its email addresses with its paid plans

Proton has been a leader in offering security software for a while now. It started with Proton Mail, which provides features like end-to-end encryption, password-protected emails, and more. Today, the company announced yet another security feature for people who sign up for paid Proton plans: dark web monitoring.

In a blog post, Proton says this new feature will scan parts of the internet that are usually hidden from public access. It will scan these parts of the dark web to find if any email addresses in the 19 current Proton Mail domains have been involved in security breaches.

The blog post added:

Our system will alert you if it finds leaked details of any of your accounts for third party websites. You’ll receive comprehensive information about the breach, including what data was compromised and the affected service, if available. Additionally, we explain what you can do to safeguard your digital identity and minimize the risks of future breaches.

The alerts that include leaked passwords will get a red colored indicator, which means users should move to change the passwords associated with that email. Alerts with an orange color will indicate that no passwords were leaked, although the data breach could still contain personal information.

Proton does say that while it does not share user data with third parties, it does check on third-party reports if it finds leaked personal info from such a site that is linked to a Proton Mail address. Pricing for the Proton plans with the dark web monitoring feature starts at $4.99 a month.

Proton plans to keep adding new functions to its dark web monitoring features in the future. They will include sending notifications to Android and iPhone smartphones, monitoring for custom email domains, and also checking on both recovery email addresses and external email addresses.

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