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There is much that could be done to improve this announcement: 1- What does "encrypted, salted passwords" mean? MD5 with a static salt? Holy shit, that's a problem. bcrypt? Less so. I have no context to know how concerned I should be, or any indication of how incompetent, or awesome, Mozilla's existing processes and defenses are. Fail. 2- They talk about a "data sanitization process" failing, but then talk about a "database dump file" being publicly accessible. Say what? This could mean anything from "an input validation error allow wrong passwords to work" to "we do a regular database dump, and store that on a public HTTP directory for some cron job to grab." Without explanation, I assume the worst. Fail. 3- "While we have not been able to detect malicious activity on that server..." Again, without the context of what happens, this statement is worthless. If you leaked the database of your users, I won't expect any malicious activity. An adversary wouldn't attack Mozilla. They would crack the passwords of the users and attempt to hijack their accounts on other sites that matter, like, banking or ecommerce sites. At best Mozilla knows this and just wanted to include some proof-point that at least they have logs/basic monitoring of stuff in place, and wanted to save face. At worse, Mozilla truly believes that someone not actively attacking them somehow means that nothing bad will happen from this loss, which is stupid. And Mozilla's Security usually isn't stupid. Fail. 4-" In addition to notifying users and recommending short term fixes, we’re also taking a look at the processes and principles that are in place that may be made better to reduce the likelihood of something like this happening again." This is a completely unsatisfactory statement. If you just discovered the problem this afternoon, like, "oh shit, why is the a .sql dump in our HTTP readable /backups/ folder?" then saying "hey, we discovered a problem, we think we have stopped it, and we are looking into our processes" is a reasonable response. However when you have "just concluded an investigation" you should, I don't know, tell us your conclusions maybe? What happened? Why did it happen? What changed in your existing system that allowed it to happen? Or has this short coming always existed? If so, who is defining/vetting your processes? What are you doing so this issue doesn't happen again? What other thing are you doing to watch the thing that's going to make sure it doesn't happen again? Instead, we get a generic statement. Fail. While not as completely opaque as some "oh no, we got pwn3d" posts, this blog post has completely failed to do the 3 things any post of this kind should do: 1) educate me about what happened 2) help me understand the risk Mozilla's actions have exposed me to, and 3) give me confidence by demonstrating clear actions you are taking so this won't happen again. Yes attacks happen, but when a company or organization is up front, honest, and over communicates, it does wonders to calm the situation. Mozilla, I expect more from you. |
MDN has been using persona for a while now, meaning that most accounts don't have passwords in the database. But older accounts still had the SHA256 salted hash that Django creates.
We traced back as much as we could. Access logs, netflow data, etc... 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.