Oh dear., or: a wikipedian's worse dream come true? Options

[CrazyGameOfPoker]

It seems like either some admins have gone rouge rogue, or even worse someone's cracking into their accounts.

First it was AndyZ who made a very "special" deletions, and another special block before finally being caught and desysopped.

As people were trying to figure out what exactly happened (Dmdevit apparently posted AndyZ's IP address as part of checkuser on AN/I, but I can't find the diff), a more sinister plot was brewing...

Apparently the devious cracker (or perhaps a copycat), found another account to get into. Apparently he decided to one up the main page image vandal, by replacing those lovely sitenotices that are on every page with Goatse. (Well he also blocked Jimbo and deleted the Main Page again, but that's small fish)

In order to calm the populace, it seems that Brion's going to run a cracker in order to find admins with weak passwords.

Meanwhile one has to wonder if this particular reign of terror is going to continue. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ph34r.gif)

[Somey]

And as usual, Cyde isn't very forgiving.

Why should we trust you to be an admin again? Your failure to take adequate security measures already got us a Tubgirl on the top of every page on Wikipedia. I and many others no longer trust you to have access to the bit anyway.

Well, I'd just like to say that I myself trust Jiang implicitly, and not only with the bit, but also the halter, the stirrups, and possibly even the lead rope.

I heard a rumor that his password was actually "jiang"...

[taiwopanfob]

If it is possible to run a client-side password cracker against Wikipedia without an alarm going off somewhere, then there are problems than can not be fixed by simply changing passwords. More than likely someone is just trying a quick sweep with a very small number of highly likely passwords, and has scored a number of hits. Wasn't everyone poo-pooing this a while back re: dormant admin accounts?

[gomi]

Here's what I don't understand: the password cracker could do much more damage if he/she compromised the account, changed the password, changed the email address, and then did nothing, or even better, acted normally, banning a few vandals here and there, voting in an AFD or RFA or whatever. There would be nothing (or at least very little) the compromised admin could do to re-take the account. Sigh.

[Somey]

Now that this has happened, somebody could also study an inactive admin's contribs for a while, then e-mail a bunch of active admins saying that he'd used a weak password and that the real admin is an impostor. Then there'd always be this vague suspicion following the real admin around like a cloud... They could ALL be impostors...!

I'll bet a good 25 percent of the admins probably use the term "lovecabal" for a password. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

[Uly]

That assumes the cracker was out to cause damage.

History seems to have shown that security exploiters are more interested in highly visible pranks than in stealthy damage.

[Rootology]

Got another pwned admin account:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...Conscious&page=

This is just absurd and silly now.

[Somey]

What was he doing, just blocking people at random? I mean, if the guy can program a bot to guess passwords, can't he program one to block all the other admins in under 60 seconds, so they don't have time to react? Or something?

C'mon, whoever you are! Can't you just save one account to do something really useful with, like start a huge wheel war with JoshuaZ, or maybe just mass-revert everything Jayjg and SlimVirgin have done since, well, Day One?

Not that he's likely to be reading this... (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif)

Come to think of it, this is starting to reach media-attention proportions, isn't it?

[Rootology]

Come to think of it, this is starting to reach media-attention proportions, isn't it?

Not until he/she/it does something more than just troll Wikipedia, probably, unless it continues going on for a decent amount of time. It's all back alley Wikipedia stuff that will get cornholed once the WP:ANI archives cycle. If only it could get out to the blogosphere...

[CrazyGameOfPoker]

Actually Somey, admins are able to use block/protect/delete when they're still blocked, so it wouldn't have an effect if he blocked all the administrators.

Certainly would be hilarious.

[The Joy]

Come to think of it, this is starting to reach media-attention proportions, isn't it?

If the hacker gets into the more prominent accounts, like JoshuaZ, Danny, or Jimbo, then it will most definitely get that way.

[Somey]

Actually Somey, admins are able to use block/protect/delete when they're still blocked, so it wouldn't have an effect if he blocked all the administrators.

Dang, they think of everything, don't they? (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/mad.gif)

I've got to get that MediaWiki test-bed installation done ASAP, so that I'll write about these things without sounding like a numbskull.

[Rootology]

ANOTHER one got haxxed.

[Unrepentant Vandal]

Well chaps, I must admit that when this story broke I was very amused, and quickly got someone even less gainfully employed than myself to write a program to test these things. I can now report that the ten most inactive admins (from the list of wikipedian admins) do not have any of the 760 most commonly used passwords which I found on the net somewhere. None of them had any of these passwords, unfortunately.

If the person *is* reading this, please change the password of any remaining compromised accounts to aardvark, it would make these searches a lot quicker.

Note that there is nothing that Wikipedia can do about this, in the long term, without substantial redesign. They can brute force the current admins and enforce password change. It would be almost impossible to do this for all current users. An intelligent cracker will be looking for future admins to try. Even if number of logins is restricted, just try 5 logins for each user. Restrict it by IP and distributed computing is your friend. Remember to monitor new users, and keep a database of those whose passwords you obtain for future use, etc etc.

I'm not sure whether I should post the program or not, but at the moment I'm leading towards no.

[The Joy]

Not Tony the Marine! This is madness! Absolute madness! What is this person's agenda? Is he a disgruntled former Wikipedian or something? Or some crazed prankster?

[Rootology]

Not Tony the Marine! This is madness! Absolute madness! What is this person's agenda? Is he a disgruntled former Wikipedian or something? Or some crazed prankster?

$10 says Cplot! Does anyone raise $15 for Willy?

[The Joy]

Is this related to the Robdurber admin going rogue? I think they proved that banned user Wonderfool was using that account.

How long will it take before the Community starts blaming one of us on WR for this fiasco?

Update: Tony the Marine's been unblocked and exonerated. He'll get his admin bit back soon. But who will fall next?

This post has been edited by The Joy:

[Unrepentant Vandal]

Not Tony the Marine! This is madness! Absolute madness! What is this person's agenda? Is he a disgruntled former Wikipedian or something? Or some crazed prankster?

$10 says Cplot! Does anyone raise $15 for Willy?

Methinks GNAA or something... Dictionary attack is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and it would appear that it takes about ten or fifteen minutes to write the software to do this.

[Somey]

What is this person's agenda?

My guess is he's upset about the supposedly "NPOV" coverage of Sony's PlayStation_3 sixth-generation videogame console.

One can hardly blame him...

Is he a disgruntled former Wikipedian or something? Or some crazed prankster?

Well, he's indef-blocked Jimbo twice now, so he at least knows that much about what's going on... In fact, this makes four times for ol' Jimbo. Pretty soon he's going to be branded a "recurring bannee."

This is the most fun we've had in months!

[Rootology]

From a Mediawiki technology standpoint, short of rushing new logon related code into production, there really isn't anything they can do at this point. They can't block all open proxies until they're used against WP. The bodies will keep falling until there are no more crap passwords for accounts. Given that this is now getting more attention, it's only a matter of time till "veteran" non-admin accounts are harvested for trolling and vandalism next. And I have to agree with Cyde on one point: you have a crap password, it's your own fault for anything bad happening. You might as well make your banking PIN number "1234".