Spread Firefox Hacked

The Mozilla Foundation's community marketing site Spread Firefox has been hacked. According to an announcement on Spread Firefox about the attack, it appears that the site was compromised in an attempt to use it to send spam. "It doesn't look like the attacker accessed any personal data on the site," the message says, "but to be safe, we're encouraging all of our users to log in and change their passwords."

WebProNews has a copy of an email about the attack sent to Spread Firefox members. The email seems to be a little less certain that no personal data was stolen, stating "it is possible that the attackers acquired information site users provided to the site". This information may include "a real name, a URL, an email address, IM names, a street address, a birthday, and private messages to other users".

According to the timeline given in the email, the attack took place on Sunday and was discovered on Tuesday. The Mozilla Foundation then took the site down, bringing it back online today along with news of the compromise. The message reassures users that only Spread Firefox was hacked; other Mozilla Foundation sites and Mozilla software were not affected.

The email implies that the site was compromised via a known flaw for which patches were available. CNET News.com has an article about the Spread Firefox attack, which says that the vulnerability was in the PHP language used to write the CivicSpace and Drupal software on which the site runs. However, Ars Technica says that the Spread Firefox exploit probably used a recently discovered flaw in Drupal itself.

roseman sent us a link to The Register, which has a article about the attack on the community marketing site. Software news forum BetaNews also has an report about the Spread Firefox hack. Over at Slashdot, there's a discussion about the Spread Firefox exploit starting.

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posted by Unknown @ 02:08