Data security is a major concern for all businesses these days with large organisations every bit as prone to exposure as SMEs. The company behind the Firefox web browser discovered this to its cost earlier this year, when it accidentally exposed 76,000 email addresses and 4,000 encrypted passwords of its own community members.
Mozilla has now owned up to the technical malfunction, which was first noticed on June 23, after a member of its developer network discovered a ‘data sanitisation process’ had gone awry.
Developers who had their details leaked were subsequently notified and advised to change their passwords as soon as possible.
76,000 email addresses and 4,000 passwords exposed Stormy Peters, Mozilla’s director of developer relations, said: "The issue came to light... when one of our web developers discovered that, starting on about June 23, for a period of 30 days, a data sanitisation process of the Mozilla Database 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 publicly accessible servers."
"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," Peters added.
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Mozilla, who place a lot of emphasis on the privacy and security of their services, was also in the spotlight back in 2010 when a loophole in its software was discovered by cyber criminals, allowing them to infect computers and malware. The security breach forced the German government to advise that people switch to a different browser. | "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," Peters added. |
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