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The site has been down for several days as the organisation assessed the potential threat and patched up any vulnerabilities.

One of the senior staff at Mozilla, Asa Dotzler said in a statement on the site, 'As you've no doubt noticed, we've been down for a few days. We took the site down to investigate an attack on the site. It appears that a part of Spread Firefox was hacked in an attempt to use it to send out spam. It does not look like the attacker accessed any personal data on the site, but to be safe, we're encouraging all of our users to log in and change their passwords.'

Although not directly related to the Firefox browser itself, the hack will be seen as something of an embarrassment to a project which has always prided itself on being that much more secure than Microsoft and Internet Explorer.