A process failed, and the DB dump that is published to help contributors improve the MDN site got out unsanitized. The sanitization/publication process will be redesigned to include stricter controls. For now, it is shut down.

MDN has been using persona for a while now, meaning that most accounts don't have passwords in the database. But older accounts still had the SHA256 salted hash that Django creates.

We traced back as much as we could. Access logs, netflow data, etc... We found that the tar.gz containing the DB dump had been downloaded only a small number of times. Mostly by known contributors. But we can't rule out that someone with malicious intentions got access to it.