This piece of news is not so good for Mozilla. It had to shut down the operations of its online store late on Tuesday because of an alarming finding. The fact is that the firm that Mozilla had hired to deal with their backend operations has suffered a security breach. Mozilla immediately issued a statement about the issue:
Today, Mozilla discovered that GatewayCDI, the third-party vendor entrusted to run the backend of the Mozilla Store, suffered a security breach. Once notified, we took the immediate preventative step of shutting down the Mozilla Store to ensure that no additional users could be compromised.
And just to be sure, the company immediately shut down the international version of their online store. While this was not really necessary since the international edition is being maintained by a separate company, Mozilla still shut it down as a precaution. As of this writing, there is no news yet as to the whether the security breach has been fixed. Indeed, Mozilla did not even really divulge details as to the nature and extent of the breach. I guess it is enough that they owned up to the issue and that they took immediate steps to stop the problem before it became serious.
And in case you were not aware of what Mozilla offers in its online store, this is where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, backpacks, mouse pads, and all sorts of other things that you can buy with the popular Mozilla logo prominently printed on them.
Moral of the story? Even one of the best IT companies in existence today is prone to hacking. Us “mortals” should learn from this.