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translatewiki.net security incident

What happened?
On September 24, 2018 a series of malicious edit attempts were detected on translatewiki.net. In general, these included attempts to inject malicious javascript, threatening messages and porn.

Upon detection it was determined that while the attacker’s attempts were unsuccessful there was a vulnerability that if properly leveraged could affect users. Because of the vulnerability it was decided to temporarily disable translation updates until countermeasures could be applied.

What information was involved?
No sensitive information was disclosed.

What are we doing about it?
The security team and others at the foundation have been working with translatewiki.net to add security relevant checks into the deployment process. While we currently have appropriate countermeasures in place we will continue to partner with translatewiki.net to add more robust security processes in the future. Translation updates will go out with the train while we continue to address architectural issues uncovered during the security incident investigation.

John Bennett
Director of Security, Wikimedia Foundation

Written by JBennett on Oct 10 2018, 8:14 PM.
User
Projects
None
Subscribers
Chassereaux, Advogato2, Bawolff and 10 others

Event Timeline

@JBennett URL is translatewiki.net no translationwiki.net. Please fix title. Thanks!

In J121#1498, @Zoranzoki21 wrote:

@JBennett URL is translatewiki.net no translationwiki.net. Please fix title. Thanks!

Done

In J121#1501, @Bawolff wrote:
In J121#1498, @Zoranzoki21 wrote:

@JBennett URL is translatewiki.net no translationwiki.net. Please fix title. Thanks!

Done

Thanks!