Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Data Protection

Mozilla Accidentally Dumps Info of 76,000 Developers to Public Web Server

Mozilla Exposes Email Addresses of 76,000 Developers and 4,000 Password Hashes

Mozilla Exposes Email Addresses of 76,000 Developers and 4,000 Password Hashes

Mozilla, the foundation behind the popular Firefox Web Browser, warned on Friday that it had mistakenly exposed information on almost 80,000 members of its Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) as a result of a botched data sanitization process.

The discovery was made in late June by one of Mozilla’s Web developers, Stormy Peters, Director of Developer Relations at Mozilla, said in a security advisory posted to the Mozilla Security Blog on Friday.

Mozilla Developer Data Exposed“Starting on about June 23, for a period of 30 days, a data sanitization process of the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) site database had been failing, resulting in the accidental disclosure of MDN email addresses of about 76,000 users and encrypted passwords of about 4,000 users on a publicly accessible server,” Peters wrote.

While the data was exposed to the public, it doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone with malicious intentions had discovered it before being cleaned up, and according to Peters, Mozilla hasn’t seen any malicious activity the server, but noted they can’t rule it out.

According to a user posting a comment to Y Combinator’s Hacker News who appears to be Julient Vehentauthor of Mozilla’s Server Side TLS and part of Mozilla’s Operations Security team, the data had been downloaded only a small number of times.

“We traced back as much as we could. Access logs, netflow data, etc.,” the user wrote. “We found that the tar.gz containing the DB dump had been downloaded only a small number of times. Mostly by known contributors. But we can’t rule out that someone with malicious intentions got access to it.”

According to Peters, the encrypted passwords were salted hashes and they by themselves cannot currently be used to authenticate with the MDN. However, Peter warned that MDN users may be at risk if they reused their original MDN passwords on other non-Mozilla websites or authentication systems. Peters further clarified in comments on the blog that the exposed passwords included salts that were unique to each user record.

Mozilla sent notices to those affected, and suggested that those who had both email and password information exposed change any similar passwords they may be using elsewhere.

In typical breach disclosure fashion, Peters explained that Mozilla was examining how the “processes and principles that are in place” could be made better to reduce the likelihood that a similar incident could happen again.

Written By

For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Data Protection

The CRYSTALS-Kyber public-key encryption and key encapsulation mechanism recommended by NIST for post-quantum cryptography has been broken using AI combined with side channel attacks.

Data Protection

The cryptopocalypse is the point at which quantum computing becomes powerful enough to use Shor’s algorithm to crack PKI encryption.

Data Breaches

LastPass DevOp engineer's home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud...

Application Security

GitHub this week announced the revocation of three certificates used for the GitHub Desktop and Atom applications.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Data Breaches

GoTo said an unidentified threat actor stole encrypted backups and an encryption key for a portion of that data during a 2022 breach.

Application Security

Many developers and security people admit to having experienced a breach effected through compromised API credentials.