Ok, so there are tons of mediawiki installations all over the internet. What do these operators do? Set their wikis to read-only mode, hang tight, and wait for a security patch?

Also, does this worm have a name?

▲

bawolff 5 hours ago | parent [-]

There is nothing to do, the incident was not caused by a vulnerability in mediawiki.

Basically someone who had permissions to alter site js, accidentally added malicious js. The main solution is to be very careful about giving user accounts permission to edit js.

[There are of course other hardening things that maybe should be done based on lessons learned]

▲

dboreham 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are already tools and techniques to validate served JS is as-intended, and these techniques could be beefed up by adding browser checks. I've been surprised these haven't been widely adopted given the spate of recent JS-poisoning attacks.

▲

streetfighter64 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, admins (or anybody other than the developers / deployment pipeline) having permissions to alter the JS sounds like a significant vulnerability. Maybe it wasn't in the early 2000s, but unencrypted HTTP was also normal then.

	▲	bawolff 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's a fair point, but keep in mind normal admin is not sufficient. For local users (the account in question wasn't local) you need to be an "interface admin", of which there are only 15 on english wikipedia. The account in question had "staff" rights which gave him basically all rights on all wikis.
	▲	LaGrange 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Well, admins (or anybody other than the developers / deployment pipeline) having permissions to alter the JS sounds like a significant vulnerability. It's a common feature of CMS'es and "tag management systems." Its presence is a massive PITA to developers even _besides_ the security, but PMs _love them_, in my experience.