On 4 May 2018 at 01:27, John Bennett jbennett@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello,
Many of you may have been receiving emails in the last 24 hours warning you of "Multiple failed attempts to log in" with your account. I wanted to let you know that the Wikimedia Foundation's Security team is aware of the situation, and working with others in the organization on steps to decrease the success of attacks like these.
The exact source is not yet known, but it is not originating from our systems. That means it is an external effort to gain unauthorized access to random accounts. These types of efforts are increasingly common for websites of our reach. A vast majority of these attempts have been unsuccessful, and we are reaching out personally to the small number of accounts which we believe have been compromised.
While we are constantly looking at improvements to our security systems and processes to offset the impact of malicious efforts such as these, the best method of prevention continues to be the steps each of you take to safeguard your accounts. Because of this, we have taken steps in the past to support things like stronger password requirements,[1] and we continue to encourage everyone to take some routine steps to maintain a secure computer and account. That includes regularly changing your passwords,[2] actively running antivirus software on your systems, and keeping your system software up to date.
My team will continue to investigate this incident, and report back if we notice any concerning changes. If you have any questions, please contact the Support and Safety team (susa{{@}}wikimedia.org).
John Bennett Director of Security, Wikimedia Foundation
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Password_strength_requirements [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ChangePassword _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Thanks for the update.
Could you please follow up with a public report about incident and the analysis. There is plenty of data available in the public domain, and an awful lot of users have been affected, there seems no special reason to keep the basic analysis a secret even if some behind-the-scenes changes might need to remain unpublished. I have raised this as a Phabricator ticket as a prompt.[1]
By the way, the Wikimedia user community is still waiting for the promised report on the OurMine hack of 11th November 2016. Could you get on with it please? Leaving users hanging for more than a year for analysis to get published is not a good look for the WMF, it leaves us wondering if this type of standard analysis gets done properly or not.[2]
Links 1. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193846 Publish analysis of sustained login attack of 3 May 2018 2. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150605 Publish an analysis of the OurMine hack
Thanks Fae