Mozilla reports user data leak from Bugzilla project

Email addresses and encrypted passwords of around 97,000 users who tested early builds of the Bugzilla bug tracking software were left exposed for three months following a server migration.

This is the second accidental data disclosure incident reported this month that affects one of the projects supported by the Mozilla Foundation.

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On August 1, the organization announced that the email addresses of 76,000 users and the encrypted passwords of 4,000 users of the Mozilla Developer Network were exposed for a period of 30 days after a database dump file was stored on a publicly accessible server.

The new data security breach disclosed Wednesday is similar and also resulted from database dump files being left in an unprotected location on a server for around three months beginning May 4th. The files had been generated during the migration of a testing server for early builds of the bug tracking software, according to Mark Côté, the Bugzilla project’s assistant lead.

“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,” Côté said Wednesday in a blog post.

Since the database originated from a development server that was used to test potentially insecure Bugzilla builds, many users likely had passwords for their accounts that were not reused elsewhere, Côté said. Nevertheless, Bugzilla maintainers notified all affected users and advised them to change any similar passwords they may have, he said.

Users of bugzilla.mozilla.org, the official Mozilla bug tracker website that’s based on the Bugzilla platform, are not affected by this incident if they didn’t also have accounts on the Bugzilla testing server and didn’t use the same password in both places.

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Following the information disclosure on the Mozilla Developer Network, “we began several remediation measures, including a review of data practices surrounding user data,” said Joe Stevensen, operations security manager at Mozilla, in a separate blog post Wednesday. “We have kicked off a larger project to better our practices around data, including with respect to the various non-Mozilla projects we support. We are implementing immediate fixes for any discovered issues across the organization, and are requiring each business unit to perform a review of their data practices and, if necessary, to implement additional protections based on that review.”