Comment on Wikipedia in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise

TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• Takapapatapaka@tarte.nuage-libre.fr ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Shameless copy/paste of the main info if anyone wants to catch a glimpse without going to reddit :

  Summary of events:

  On 5 March 2026, a Wikimedia Foundation employee accidentally imported a malicious script to his account on Meta-Wiki while testing global API limits for user scripts (see his global.js page history). The malicious script was created in 2023 to attack two Russian-language alternative wiki projects, Wikireality and Cyclopedia. In 2024, user Ololoshka562 created a page on the Russian Wikipedia containing the script used in these attacks. The script, which had been sitting dormant on ruwiki for 1.5 years, then spread to several accounts on Meta, including WMFOffice, and mass-deleted pages in namespaces 0–3, leaving behind an edit summary of “Закрываем проект”, Russian for “Closing the project”. The staff member, as a global interface administrator, has permission to edit meta:MediaWiki:Common.js, which allowed the script to infect any user who visited Meta-Wiki while it was active. To prevent the script from spreading further, all Wikimedia projects were set to read-only for about 2 hours, and all user JavaScript was temporarily disabled.

  Post from WMF staff member on Discord:

  Hey all - as some of you have seen, we (WMF) were doing a security review of the behavior of user scripts, and unintentionally activated one that turned out to be malicious. That is what caused the page deletions you saw on the Meta log, which are getting cleaned up. We have no reason to believe any third-party entity was actively attacking us today, or that any permanent damage occurred or any breach of personal information.

  We were doing this security review as part of an effort to limit the risks of exactly this kind of attack. The irony of us triggering this script while doing so is not lost on us, and we are sorry about the disruption. But the risks in this system are real. We are going to continue working on security protections for user scripts – in close consultation with the community, of course – to make this sort of thing much harder to happen in the future.

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  • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    To be fair I would assume that it’s better to trigger something like this during a security review when people are actively “online” and focused on security risks than at some other time.

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    • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Absolutely and it helped prove why they needed to do this security review to begin with as well as will teach them the nature of how this user script worked so they can put up guardrails for this specific type of attack. An unfortunate event but as long as they are using it to learn from and strengthen their security, overall it’s a good thing.

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  • Jack@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    To prevent the script from spreading further, all Wikimedia projects were set to read-only for about 2 hours, and all user JavaScript was temporarily disabled.

    The NoScript extension in Firefox makes the web so much nicer. It turns out sites that don’t require JavaScript tend to made by vastly better humans than sites that do. More so for sites that require cross-site scripting and cookies to just show text.

    Can’t search on google.com without allowing JavaScript, but it turns out Lite.DuckDuckGo does, and for me at least gives vastly better search results.

    Wikipedia can be read and edited without allowing JavaScript, and I personally don’t like the crap that the scripts provide. It’s also usable without cookies, tho the idiotic UI options column on the right is a hassle without cookies.

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  • Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    That’s hilarious, and I cannot imagine how stressed out that employee is.

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    • db2@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      After that kind of learning experience that employee needs a reprimand and a raise in that order. You can be that shit won’t happen twice! 😆

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      • crandlecan@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        You want even more Management?? 😨

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        • -> View More Comments
  • deacon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Ironically it is comments like these that led to Reddit gold. But thank you kind stranger for saving me having to descend into The Depths for this.

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  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Danke. This should easily be fine for anyone who’s slightly-to-moderately interested; some of the nitty-gritty details like the edit diffs are excluded from this copy–paste for those who really know their stuff and want to learn more.

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  • Sims@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    “The malicious script was created in 2023 to attack two Russian-language alternative wiki projects, Wikireality and Cyclopedia.”

    So this was a US/Ukrainian attack on Russia that backfired ?? Weird ‘friendly fire’ situation…

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