The Firefox Marketing Site Was Hacked for the Second Time

The Firefox promotion and marketing site, Spreadfirefox.com, has recently been under hacker attack. In their last attempt, the virtual terrorists have successfully exploited a flaw in the TWiki software which ran on the site's webserver.

The Mozilla Foundation thinks that no user information has been compromised, but advises members to change their passwords to avoid any future issues. Spreadfirefox.com currently has 100,000 registered users.

This is the second time in the last three months when the site is targeted by hackers. In July 2005, SpreadFirefox was successfully hacked and used as a spam generator. That time the attackers had also obtained users' personal information, such as e-mail addresses, birth dates and their IM nicknames.

After the first attack, Mozilla Foundation changed its security measures, but forgot about the TWiki software, which hadn't been used for a long time.

The TWiki flaw was discovered on September 15, and the attack on SpreadFirefox.com was launched only a few hours after it was made public. Unfortunately, the site's administrators found out about the problem only this weekend.

SpreadFirefox.com is the organization which raised almost $200,000 last year. The money was used to pay for a two page ad in the New York Times, intended to promote the Firefox browser.

Mozilla Foundation announced that its site will be available again on October 15.


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