Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-05-14/Compromised accounts

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Compromised accounts

Administrator status restored to five accounts after emergency desysopping

Last week the Signpost

weak
or insecure passwords were indefinitely blocked and desysopped after they were hijacked by an unknown person who cracked the password.

This week, a fifth administrator account was temporarily hijacked by the same vandal, although it was restored to the user's control a few hours later. All four of the original administrator accounts have been unblocked and resysopped.

method by which editors may place encrypted identifying information about themselves on their user pages, so they can easily confirm their identity in case of future password attacks (see related story
).

KnowledgeOfSelf

On Tuesday, 8 May,

Brion VIBBER, who reset the account password to enable KnowledgeOfSelf to retake control about 5 hours later. Bureaucrat Raul654 restored
his administrator privileges.

AndyZ

AndyZ (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was blocked and desysopped on Monday, 7 May, after his password was compromised and his account used for vandalism. AndyZ was unblocked on Tuesday, after establishing his identity to Mark. His administrator rights were restored on Wednesday.

Jiang

Jiang (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), who was also blocked and desysopped Monday morning, was unblocked Monday evening, 7 May and resysopped Thursday evening, 10 May.

Marine 69-71

Marine 69-71 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was unblocked and resysopped on Monday, May 7, a few hours after the hijacking.

Conscious

Conscious (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was unblocked and resysopped Thursday after checkuser confirmed that he was still in control of his account.

BuickCenturyDriver

Finally, the indefinite block on BuickCenturyDriver (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was lifted three days after the incident, based on an apology and on checkuser evidence that he was responsible for blocking Ryulong from AndyZ's account but was not the culprit behind the attack.

See also