Wow. This worm is fascinating. It seems to do the following:
- Inject itself into the MediaWiki:Common.js page to persist globally, and into the User:Common.js page to do the same as a fallback
- Uses jQuery to hide UI elements that would reveal the infection
- Vandalizes 20 random articles with a 5000px wide image and another XSS script from basemetrika.ru
- If an admin is infected, it will use the Special:Nuke page to delete 3 random articles from the global namespace, AND use the Special:Random with action=delete to delete another 20 random articles
EDIT! The Special:Nuke is really weird. It gets a default list of articles to nuke from the search field, which could be any group of articles, and rubber-stamps nuking them. It does this three times in a row.
In the early 2010’s I worked for a company whose primary income was subscriptions to site protection services - one of which included cleaning up malware-infected Wordpress installations. I worked on the team that did this job.
This exact type of database-stored executable javascript was one of the most annoying types of infections to clean up.
The Wikipedia community takes a cavalier attitude towards security. Any user with "interface administrator" status can change global JavaScript or CSS for all users on a given Wiki with no review. They added mandatory 2FA only a few years ago...
Prior to this, any admin had that ability until it was taken away due to English Wikipedia admins reverting Wikimedia changes to site presentation (Mediaviewer).
But that's not all. Most "power users" and admins install "user scripts", which are unsandboxed JavaScript/CSS gadgets that can completely change the operation of the site. Those user scripts are often maintained by long abandoned user accounts with no 2 factor authentication.
Based on the fact user scripts are globally disabled now I'm guessing this was a vector.
The Wikimedia foundation knows this is a security nightmare. I've certainly complained about this when I was an editor.
But most editors that use the website are not professional developers and view attempts to lock down scripting as a power grab by the Wikimedia Foundation.
> Prior to this, any admin had that ability until it was taken away due to English Wikipedia admins reverting Wikimedia changes to site presentation (Mediaviewer).
You're mixing up events. Superprotect is unrelated to the IAdmin separation from normal admin. The two are separated by many years and basically totally unrelated.
Too much app logic in the client side (Javascript) has always been an attack vector. The more that can reasonably be server side, the more that can't be seen.
I completely understand marking the software that controls drinking water as critical infrastructure- but at some point a state based cyber attack that just wipes wikipedia off the net is deeply damaging to our modern society’s ability to agree on common facts …
Just now thought “if Wikipedia vanished what would it mean … and it’s not on the level of safe drinking water, but it is a level.
Another reason to make the default disabling JS on all websites, and the website should offer a service without JS, especially those implemented in obsolete garbage tech. If it's not an XSS from a famous website, it will be an exploit from a sketchy website.
A theory on phab: "Some investigation was made in Russian Wikipedia discord chat, maybe it will be useful.
1. In 2023, vandal attacks was made against two Russian-language alternative wiki projects, Wikireality and Cyclopedia. Here https://wikireality.ru/wiki/РАОрг is an article about organisators of these attacks.
> Hitting MediaWiki:Common.js is the absolute nightmare scenario for MediaWiki deployments because that script gets executed by literally every single visitor
...except for us security wonks who have js turned off by default, don't enable it without good reason, disable it ASAP, and take a dim view of websites that require it.
Not too many years ago this behavior was the domain of Luddites and schizophrenics. Today it has become a useful tool in the toolbox of reasonable self-defense for anybody with UID 0.
Perhaps the WMF should re-evaluate just how specialsnowflake they think their UI is and see if, maybe just maybe, they can get by without js. Just a thought.
> Cleaning this up is going to be an absolute forensic nightmare for the Wikimedia team since the database history itself is the active distribution vector.
Well, worm didn't get root -- so if wikimedia snapshots or made a recent backup, probably not so much of a nightmare? Then the diffs can tell a fairly detailed forensic story, including indicators of motive.
Snapshotting is a very low-overhead operation, so you can make them very frequently and then expire them after some time.
I wonder if the bad traffic overwhelmed the good traffic enough that it's simpler to pick out some of the good traffic from the bad and replay it rather than spot all of the bad traffic.
This is unfortunate that Wikipedia is under attack. It seems as if there are more malicious actors now than, say, 5 years ago.
This may be unrelated but I also noticed more attacks on e. g. libgen, Anna's archive and what not. I am not at all saying this is similar to Wikipedia as such, mind you, but it really seems as if there are more actors active now who target people's freedom now (e. g. freedom of choice of access to any kind of information; age restriction aka age "verification" taps into this too).
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 62.6 ms ] threadhttps://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14555
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(techni...
https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1rllcdg/megathre...
Apparent JS worm payload: https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D0%A3%D1%87%D0%B...
I’ve always thought the fact that MediaWiki sometimes lets editors embed JavaScript could be dangerous.
- Inject itself into the MediaWiki:Common.js page to persist globally, and into the User:Common.js page to do the same as a fallback
- Uses jQuery to hide UI elements that would reveal the infection
- Vandalizes 20 random articles with a 5000px wide image and another XSS script from basemetrika.ru
- If an admin is infected, it will use the Special:Nuke page to delete 3 random articles from the global namespace, AND use the Special:Random with action=delete to delete another 20 random articles
EDIT! The Special:Nuke is really weird. It gets a default list of articles to nuke from the search field, which could be any group of articles, and rubber-stamps nuking them. It does this three times in a row.
This exact type of database-stored executable javascript was one of the most annoying types of infections to clean up.
The Wikipedia community takes a cavalier attitude towards security. Any user with "interface administrator" status can change global JavaScript or CSS for all users on a given Wiki with no review. They added mandatory 2FA only a few years ago...
Prior to this, any admin had that ability until it was taken away due to English Wikipedia admins reverting Wikimedia changes to site presentation (Mediaviewer).
But that's not all. Most "power users" and admins install "user scripts", which are unsandboxed JavaScript/CSS gadgets that can completely change the operation of the site. Those user scripts are often maintained by long abandoned user accounts with no 2 factor authentication.
Based on the fact user scripts are globally disabled now I'm guessing this was a vector.
The Wikimedia foundation knows this is a security nightmare. I've certainly complained about this when I was an editor.
But most editors that use the website are not professional developers and view attempts to lock down scripting as a power grab by the Wikimedia Foundation.
https://bash.toolforge.org/quip/AU8FCPz66snAnmqnLHDj
You're mixing up events. Superprotect is unrelated to the IAdmin separation from normal admin. The two are separated by many years and basically totally unrelated.
I agree with the rest of your post.
Just now thought “if Wikipedia vanished what would it mean … and it’s not on the level of safe drinking water, but it is a level.
1. In 2023, vandal attacks was made against two Russian-language alternative wiki projects, Wikireality and Cyclopedia. Here https://wikireality.ru/wiki/РАОрг is an article about organisators of these attacks.
2. In 2024, ruwiki user Ololoshka562 created a page https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Ololoshka562/test.js containing script used in these attacks. It was inactive next 1.5 years.
3. Today, sbassett massively loaded other users' scripts into his global.js on meta, maybe for testing global API limits: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/SBasse... . In one edit, he loaded Ololoshka's script: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=30167... and run it."
Find the first instance and reset to the backup before then. An hour, a day, a week? Doesn't matter that much in this case.
...except for us security wonks who have js turned off by default, don't enable it without good reason, disable it ASAP, and take a dim view of websites that require it.
Not too many years ago this behavior was the domain of Luddites and schizophrenics. Today it has become a useful tool in the toolbox of reasonable self-defense for anybody with UID 0.
Perhaps the WMF should re-evaluate just how specialsnowflake they think their UI is and see if, maybe just maybe, they can get by without js. Just a thought.
edit: lol downvoted with no counterpoint, is it hitting a nerve?
Well, worm didn't get root -- so if wikimedia snapshots or made a recent backup, probably not so much of a nightmare? Then the diffs can tell a fairly detailed forensic story, including indicators of motive.
Snapshotting is a very low-overhead operation, so you can make them very frequently and then expire them after some time.
This may be unrelated but I also noticed more attacks on e. g. libgen, Anna's archive and what not. I am not at all saying this is similar to Wikipedia as such, mind you, but it really seems as if there are more actors active now who target people's freedom now (e. g. freedom of choice of access to any kind of information; age restriction aka age "verification" taps into this too).