Malicious person steals confidential information about Firefox bugs

A hacker has managed to break into Mozilla’s bug reporting system, Bugzilla. He stole confidential information. Mozilla believes the hacker used the information to exploit a recently patched security vulnerability in Firefox.

Via Bugzilla, users report errors in Firefox to developers, among other things. Most of the information about those bugs is public, but some data is protected. This concerns, for example, information that endangers the security of Firefox users.

Mozilla reported Friday evening that someone recently managed to steal that confidential data by hacking into a Bugzilla account. The organization believes that person used the acquired knowledge to attack Firefox users through an exploit in the PDF viewer. That problem was fixed at the beginning of last month. Nothing is known about any victims.

The Firefox maker says it has taken measures to prevent someone from breaking into Bugzilla again. For example, all users of the reporting software must change their passwords and use two-step verification. Improvements have also been made to the software to prevent further security threats. Mozilla suspects based on current information that the attacker does not otherwise exploit known vulnerabilities in Firefox.