Mr. Watchdog

Mr. Watchdog reporting on Adobe
Mr. Watchdog

Inspiration

Considering what is going on in the world lately and everything being remote, people are spending a good chunk of time on the internet. Based on our research we discovered that on average a user has 90 online accounts. Research also stated people spend approximately $1.6 million online every minute. Costs of Data breached have been plunging as to compare that of previous years. It plunged by 10% - approximately $1.2 million/ minute. Considering all these statistics our team wanted to build something for the security of web users. Therefore, we decided to build a chrome extension- Mr. Watchdog. It is inspired by haveibeenpwnd. com, which allows users to see if their account was compromised in any recent data breaches.

What it does

Mr. Watchdog is a Google Chrome extension that informs the user about the security history of a website. It alerts you when a site has been recently breached, has a history of breaches, is known to download malware or spam users.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble figuring out how to pass data around in our extension. The Google Chrome documentation wasn't very clear about how data should be sent between different JavaScript files and the only two examples provided in the documentation weren't useful.

Google Chrome also moved to Manifest 3 recently from Manifest 2. About 90% of all tutorials on Google Chrome extensions are for Manifest 2, so we ran into some issues trying to call Chrome's APIs. A great example of this is the Google Chrome DocumentationGitHub repo, which contains examples of extensions. There are about 60 examples with Manifest 2, but only 8 with Manifest 3.

We also ran into limitations with our News API. We're on the free tier, so we're limited to only news articles that have occurred in the last month.