97,000 Bugzilla Testers’ Data Dumped on Public Server

Mozilla is warning users who have contributed to testing builds of the online bug-tracking tool Bugzilla that their email addresses and encrypted passwords were publicly available for a period of three months.

The information of 97,000 users who had created test installations on landfill.bugzilla.org were inadvertently posted to a public Web server on May 4, when the server for test builds was migrated. The leak was discovered by a Bugzilla developer.

“As soon as we became aware, the database dump files were removed from the server immediately, and we’ve modified the testing process to not require database dumps,” Mark Côté, assistant project lead at Bugzilla, noted in a blog post.

“Generally, developers who use our test builds have told us they understand that these builds are insecure and may break, so they do not use passwords they would reuse elsewhere,” Côté said.

However, as a precaution, passwords on all test systems have been reset. Users will be required to set new ones next time they access Bugzilla test systems. Users of bugzilla.mozilla.org are not affected by the incident, unless they have used the same password as on landfill.bugzilla.org,  Côté clarified.

A note posted on the Landfill website instructs users not to enter any information that is considered private or sensitive because the site is for testing and demonstration purposes.

This isn’t the first time Mozilla accidentally leaks user data. On August 1, the company revealed that a botched data sanitization process of the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) database resulted in the email addresses of 76,000 users and the encrypted passwords of 4,000 users being posted to a publicly accessible server. 

The data was available for 30 days, but it was reportedly downloaded only by a small number of users, most of which were known contributors.

“The encrypted passwords were salted hashes and they by themselves cannot be used to authenticate with the MDN website today. Still, it is possible that some MDN users could have reused their original MDN passwords on other non-Mozilla websites or authentication systems,” Stormy Peters, Director of Developer Relations at Mozilla, said at the time.