MDN Database Disclosure

Emails were just sent out to users, full text: https://gist.github.com/simonsarris/829ba1c0669c404f0da5

The emails are customized for each type of affected user.

Can someone explain the meaning of "data sanitization process of the site database had been failing"

Isn't that another way of saying SQL injection ?

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.

I wondered about this too. At a guess, perhaps they were doing a straight database dump from a production system which had sensitive information as well as public data. They would then run a script to delete the sensitive columns before posting the dump.

This seems likely to have been broken at the design stage: systems should fail safe. The first-order fix might be to check the return value of the sanitizer script and refuse to upload if it failed. But a better solution would be to write a system which makes it much less likely to leak private data. For example by copying only whitelisted columns (so if new sensitive columns are added to the system they are not dumped by default). Or storing sensitive data in separate tables or even a separate database (this will take more work if levels of sensitivity change over time).

I've speculated here about the details to illustrate the point about systems design. Unfortunately, too often the glue code for these sorts of things is written with little or no error checking, so when something is wrong the system just proceeds through unknown or unvalidated states as we see here. It doesn't help that the default language for cron and a lot of "supervisory" jobs tends to be Bash (or Dash) these days, where error checking is turned off by default.