Mozilla, Again, Accidentally Hacks its Developers

For the second time in a month, Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox browser, has inadvertently leaked programmers’ passwords and usernames.

During a transfer of data from a testing server, database dump files containing email addresses and encrypted passwords of roughly 97,000 users of a test build for Bugzilla bug-tracking software were posted on a public server.

The compromise occurred during a three-month period beginning May 4.

“We’ve modified the testing process to not require database dumps,” Bugzilla Assistant Project Lead Mark Côté wrote on one of the organization’s blogs.

Generally, developers who work on test builds realize that the systems are insecure, so they do not use the same passwords they use on other more-sensitive sites.

Mozilla was alerted to the problem in a security bug report filed by a contributor.

The incident did not affect email addresses or passwords for bugzilla.mozilla.org, the official bug-tracking database.

In a separate blog post, the Mozilla organization discussed broad security reforms, adding, “We are committed to continuing to improve our data practices to minimize the likelihood of these and other types of incidents.”