Huh, so it wasn’t my network having issues. The weird thing was. That at the same time google.com (though not google.de) stopped working. Weird coincidence?
Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
21–30 of 320 posts
Re: Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
#22I'm not surprised. There are a lot of people banned from Wikipedia by their abusive admins looking for revenge.
Re: Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
#23Maybe the damage will randomly improve the political articles and knock down some of the fiefdoms for a change. Couldn't get much worse...
Re: Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
#24Remember: there are BitTorrent links that the Wikimedia Foundation gives out of SQL dumps of Wikipedia and the other projects. You can have a copy in case this happens in your country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Wh... Also, the Kiwix project has a hotspot project that allows you to host ZIM files (dumps of Wikipedia and other CC licensed content, like TED talks and StackOverflow) on a R…
Assuming that all formats contain the exact same data, i.e. they were generated at the exact same time, which is the (1) most useful for offline viewing (2) most future proof for archival and backup? Is there another, more viable/useful format?
Re: Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
#25Apparently this group is behind it. Also attacked WoW and twitch servers.. https://twitter.com/ukdrillas
Part of the liability should be shared with the people owning the compromised machines these crazies are using for their attacks, otherwise attacks like these will never stop as long as enough free “ammunition” is being left around by incompetent people who can’t be bothered to secure & monitor their systems properly.
Edit: in reply to some of the (valid) counter-arguments, I'd like to say that there are indeed many issues that will need to be considered before passing such a law - this is just an overall idea. In addition, my intent isn't to punish the occasional kid doing something stupid and leaving a misconfigured device, it's to punish companies selling/deploying obviously insecure devices at a large scale, like ISPs deploying cheap shitty outdated network hardware or the countless resellers white-labelling insecure network cameras. Currently there is no penalty for manufacturing insecure hardware and this situation is the consequence of that - I'd like to fix this problem. We have regulations that (mostly successfully) prevent companies from selling hardware that blows up and destroys your house, why can't we have the same for networked hardware?
Re: Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
#26That post neither says what they know nor what they’re doing IMHO. I hope there will be a more detailed post Morten soon.
Re: Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
#27I appreciate them making this statement. I had issues accessing Wikipedia from Turkey a week ago and I assumed censorship, but this week I have also had issues accessing it from Poland and I started suspecting something was amiss.
Re: Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
#28Just want to mention, WMF has a very small but elite team of engineers. Amazed they maintain an Alexa top 5 site with many orders of magnitude less engineering staff than Facebook or Reddit. I think they must count ~100 engineers? I can't imagine what such a small team must be going through with a major DDOS - wish them well in their efforts!
> I think they must count ~100 engineers? https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ has the names of 379 employees. I believe (perhaps astonishingly) that is all - engineers and non-engineers combined. Their engineers spread across departments, but judging by the 141 instances of the string 'engineer' in that page, I'd be surprised if the number exceeds 200.
That’s what happens I guess when you’re running a charity, you can recruit top talent (I assume many 10x folks wouldn’t mind working for wikimedia!) and every dollar counts. Pretty incredible.
Re: Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
#29I'm not surprised. There are a lot of people banned from Wikipedia by their abusive admins looking for revenge.
It might be, but currently doesn't appear that's the motivation here, not if they're also attacking twitch & WoW.
Re: Malicious attack on Wikipedia – what we know and what we’re doing
#30I don't understand the goal though. What to gain ? Training for another big target ?