Mozilla gaffe exposed 76,000 email addresses, 4000 passwords

You know the drill: Utter expletive, grind teeth, change passwords, get on with life.

Mozilla has 'fessed up to accidentally exposing the email addresses for 76,000 members of its Developer Network, along with 4000 encrypted passwords. The breach was caused by a bad script that on July 23 was found to have inadvertently published the records online over the previous month.

The offending data sanitisation process failed, resulting in the breach, Mozilla's developer and security heads Stormy Peters and Joe Stevensen wrote in a co-authored post.

"As soon as we learned of it, the database dump file was removed from the server immediately, and the process that generates the dump was disabled to prevent further disclosure," they said. "While we have not been able to detect malicious activity on that server, we cannot be sure there wasn't any such access."

The exposed passwords were salted hashes but further technical details have not been revealed. The paid warned Mozilla Developer Network users to change affected passwords that were re-used on other websites.

The duo said Mozilla would review unspecified security measures including "processes and principles" that may prevent a repeat breach. Mozilla has had few security breaches. A similar breach occurred back in 2010 when a security researcher found a partial database of 44,000 inactive Mozilla addons on a public server. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/03/mozilla_gaffe_exposed_76000_email_addresses_4000_passwords/