In short, a Wikimedia Foundation account was doing some sort of test which involved loading a large number of user scripts. They decided to just start loading random user scripts, instead of creating some just for this test.

The user who ran this test is a Staff Security Engineer at WMF, and naturally they decided to do this test under their highly-privileged Wikimedia Foundation staff account, which has permissions to edit the global CSS and JS that runs on every page.

One of those random scripts was a 2 year old malicious script from ruwiki. This script injects itself in the global Javascript on every page, and then in the userscripts of any user that runs into it, so it started spreading and doing damage really fast. This triggered tons of alerts, until the decision was made to turn the Wiki read-only.

- 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.

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.

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."

I’ve always thought the fact that MediaWiki sometimes lets editors embed JavaScript could be dangerous.

  "The incident appears to have been a cross-site scripting hack. The origin of rhe malicious scripts was a userpage on the Russian Wikipedia. The script contained Russian language text.

  During the shutdown, users monitoring [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/special:RecentChanges Recent changes page on Meta] could view WMF operators manually reverting what appeared to be a worm propagated in common.js

  Hopefully this means they won't have to do a database rollback, i.e. no lost edits. "

https://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...

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.

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.

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.

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).

For Wikipedia, consider a central read-only aggregated mirror that delegates the editorial function to specialized communities. Common, suggested tooling (software and processes) could be maintained centrally but each community might be improved with more independence. This separation of concerns may be a better fit for knowledge collection and archival.

Note: I edited to stress central mirroring of static content with delegation of editorial function to contributing organizations. I'm expressly not endorsing technical "dynamic" federation approaches.

This exact type of database-stored executable javascript was one of the most annoying types of infections to clean up.

...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?

Who wins the most from a Wikipedia outage and has questionable moral views? The same who currently struggles to find paying customers for his services.

The large AI companies.

Despite the constant screeching for donations, the entire site is owned by a company with shareholders. All the “donations” go to them. They already met their funding needs for the next century a long time ago, this is all profit.

There's also a lot of client-side authentication, even with financial transactions, e.g. with iOS and Android locally verifying a users password, or worse yet a PIN or biographic information, then sending approval to the server. Granted, authentication of any kind is optional for credit card transactions in the US, so all the rest is security theater, but if it did matter, it would be the worst way to do it.