Open Stack

Elizabeth
I hope you feel better.
Just FYI, this is going full force in IRC right now. I’ve bowed out as the
approach I was suggesting didn’t get traction.
I proposed to manually iterate on this to confirm precisely which change solves
the spam problem. Once that has been identified we can revert and come up with a
proper patch. Right now the assumption is that disabling manual accounts will
solve the problem (and it might). As a result the team is trying to solve for
the consequences of not having manual accounts. Some bots currently use manual
accounts among other issues. If the assumption is correct, these efforts will be
worth it. However, if it isn’t it will have been a great waste of energy.
In any case have a good weekend everyone. I’m off to eat some delicious central
Texas BBQ!

J.P. Maxwell | tipit.net [http://tipit.net] | fibercove.com [http://www.fibercove.com]
On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Elizabeth K. Joseph <lyz at princessleia.com>
wrote:
We'll be getting together on Monday around 1700 UTC to work through this
together in a debug session in #openstack-infra (I'm too sick this weekend, plus
we need a time when more infra-root folks with the institutional knowledge are
around).

On Feb 27, 2016 05:37, "Marton Kiss" < marton.kiss at gmail.com [marton.kiss at gmail.com] > wrote:
Yeah, the Settings.php was overriden by the latest puppet run. We need to wait
for some infra guys to approve my patches and make it permanent: https://review.openstack.org/285669 [https://review.openstack.org/285669] Disable standard password based auth
https://review.openstack.org/285672 [https://review.openstack.org/285672] Disable mobile frontend
M.
On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:27 PM JP Maxwell < jp at tipit.net [jp at tipit.net] > wrote:
FYI. Still seeing the mobile view...

J.P. Maxwell | tipit.net [http://tipit.net] | fibercove.com [http://fibercove.com]

On Feb 27, 2016 6:53 AM, "Marton Kiss" < marton.kiss at gmail.com [marton.kiss at gmail.com] > wrote:
Yes, applied them manually. Let's wait a few hours, and check for new spam
content / user accounts.

M.
JP Maxwell < jp at tipit.net [jp at tipit.net] > (időpont: 2016. febr. 27., Szo, 13:50) ezt írta:
Cool. Are these applied? Any indication it has stopped the spam? Should we clear
out these non launchpad accounts from the DB?

J.P. Maxwell | tipit.net [http://tipit.net] | fibercove.com [http://fibercove.com]

On Feb 27, 2016 6:47 AM, "Marton Kiss" < marton.kiss at gmail.com [marton.kiss at gmail.com] > wrote:
And the mobile frontend will be disabled permanently with this patch: https://review.openstack.org/285672 [https://review.openstack.org/285672] Disable mobile frontend

M.
On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:39 PM Marton Kiss < marton.kiss at gmail.com [marton.kiss at gmail.com] > wrote:
I made some investigation, and it seems to be that the spam pages are created by
accounts registered with password accounts, and the launchpad openid auth is not
affected at all.
So the spam script is creating accounts like this: mysql> select * from user where user_name = 'CedricJamieson'\G; *************************** 1. row *************************** user_id: 7494 user_name: CedricJamieson user_real_name: Cedric Jamieson user_password:
:pbkdf2:sha256:10000:128:Mlo9tdaP+38niZrrEka7Ow==:jEVnrTclkwIpE1RzJywDlrSvkY5G3idYwOwYRkv5O0J/MSHjY+gdhtKmArQ53v6/w7o8E1wXb2QOR6HdL5TPfOI1bswS/fYXVVYjPjkEEdxqZ8q9L5p2f3N6rEYpMfT5tk+wDiy+j5aimrHrGSga44hndAHgX9/SnqUyxlutDVY= user_newpassword: user_newpass_time: NULL user_email: balashkina.evdokiya at mail.ru [balashkina.evdokiya at mail.ru] user_touched: 20160227052454 user_token: 7c39e44e849fb0e2bfae8790d6cc1379 user_email_authenticated: NULL user_email_token: be963ac3bd43e70ff2f323063c61e320 user_email_token_expires: 20160305052441 user_registration: 20160227052441 user_editcount: 2 user_password_expires: NULL
The user_password field is always filled with a value, meanwhile this field of
non-infected user accounts with openid logins is empty. We have 423 total accounts with passwords: mysql> select count(*) from user where user_password != ''; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 423 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Mediawiki logs-in the newly created users without any preliminary email
confirmation, right after the registration. I disabled the standard user login
page, as described here: 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Special_pages#Disabling_Special:UserLogin_and_Special:UserLogout_pages
[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Special_pages#Disabling_Special:UserLogin_and_Special:UserLogout_pages]
And I made this patch to make it permanent: https://review.openstack.org/285669 [https://review.openstack.org/285669] Disable standard password based auth

Just for the record, the last spam user account: 7536 | EarthaChester22

Marton

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 8:31 AM Marton Kiss < marton.kiss at gmail.com [marton.kiss at gmail.com] > wrote:
Hi,
I created the following patch, infra cores must approve that: https://review.openstack.org/285641 [https://review.openstack.org/285641] Add ssh key of JP Maxwell to wiki.o.o

Marton
On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 6:41 AM JP Maxwell < jp at tipit.net [jp at tipit.net] > wrote:
Marton has SSH access and applied a patch earlier today. It appears the spam
continues to flow:
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/40_Thoughts_Of_Using_Open_Shelves_On_A_Kitchen
[https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/40_Thoughts_Of_Using_Open_Shelves_On_A_Kitchen]

Marton let me know if you can look at it some more or Infra if you want to give
me SSH I'll do so as well in the morning (public key attached).


ssh-rsa
AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEA2b5I7Yff9FCrtRmSjpILUePi54Vbc8zqJTbzrIAQZGFLBi3xd2MLlhV5QVgpDBC9H3lGjbdnc81D3aFd3HwHT4dvvvyedT12PR3VDEpftdW84vw3jzdtALcayOQznjbGnScwvX5SgnRhNxuX9Rkh8qNvOsjYPUafRr9azkQoomJFkdNVI4Vb5DbLhTpt18FPeOf0UuqDt/J2tHI4SjZ3kjzr7Nbwpg8xGgANPNE0+2pJbwCA8YDt4g3bzfzvVafQs5o9Gfc9tudkR9ugQG1M+EWCgu42CleOwMTd/rYEB2fgNNPsZAWqwQfdPajVuk70EBKUEQSyoA09eEZX+xJN9Q== jpmaxman at tipit.net [jpmaxman at tipit.net]








J.P. Maxwell / tipit.net [http://www.tipit.net]


On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 12:09 PM, Jimmy McArthur < jimmy at openstack.org [jimmy at openstack.org] > wrote:
Super thankful for all the folks that have jumped in over the last couple of
days to help with the puppetization, etc... I just feel like we're taking a very
wrong approach here.

Paul Belanger wrote:
Right, and I don't have an issue with that approach.  Based on the work we did
yesterday, anybody can do that via our workflow. Please submit a patch to
puppet-mediawiki[1] and ping an infra-root in #openstack-infra IRC.

What I'm proposing is the workflow is really meant for software, not for web
applications. It's tedious and time consuming when what's needed here is a set
of tests on the server. Submitting a patch, waiting for a +1, then getting on
IRC to find someone with access (and time) to paste the logs is a pretty time
consuming process for what should be a series of rapid-fire changes/fixes on the
server. Especially when we're dealign with an active attack.
We can then have somebody look at the logs.  I think it is more about scheduling
the task since more infra-root as travling back from the mid-cycle last night
and today.

Right, this is my point. This has been going on for 3 weeks (or more). Tom
Fifeldt was asking for help without response. And here we are through another
week and no closer to stemming the flow.

I'm fully aware what I'm proposing goes against what Infra and the OpenStack
workflow is all about, but I'd ask you all to look at this from a web
development perspective instead of a software development perspective.

Jimmy
Last email from me, just on a plane.  Will follow up when I land.

[1] https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/puppet-mediawiki [https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/puppet-mediawiki]

J.P. Maxwell | tipit.net [http://tipit.net] [http://tipit.net [http://tipit.net]] | fibercove.com [http://fibercove.com]
[http://www.fibercove.com [http://www.fibercove.com]]
On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 11:25 AM, Paul Belanger <pabelanger at redhat.com> [pabelanger at redhat.com]
wrote:
On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 11:08:18AM -0600, Jimmy McArthur wrote:


Given the state of the wiki a the moment, I think taking the quickest path
to get it fixed would be prudent. Is there a way we can get JP root access
to this server, even temporarily? We get 25% of our website traffic (2
million visitors) to the wiki. I realize we're all after the same thing,


but


spammers are not going to hit the dev environment, so there's really no


way


to tell if teh problem is fixed without actually working directly on the
production machine. This should be a 30 minute fix.



I am still unclear what the 30min fix is. If really 30mins, then it
shouldn't be
hard to get the fix into our workflow. Could somebody please elaborate.

If we are talking about deploying new versions of php or mediawiki manually,
I
not be in-favor of this. To me, while the attack sucks, we should be working
on
2 fronts. Getting the help needed to mitigate the attack, then adding the
changes into -infra workflow in parallel.



I realize there is a lot of risk in giving ssh access to infra machines,


but


I think it's worth taking a look at either putting this machine in a place
where a different level of admin could access it without giving away the
keys to the entire OpenStack infrastructure or figuring out a way to set


up


credentials with varying levels of access.



As a note, all the work I've been doing to help with the attack hasn't
require
SSH access for me to wiki.o.o. I did need infra-root help to expose our
configuration safely. I'd rather take some time to see what the fixes are,
having infra-root apply changes, then move them into puppet.

It also has been discussed to simply disable write access to the wiki if we
really want spamming to stop, obviously that will affect normal usage.



Jimmy

Paul Belanger wrote:


On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 10:12:12AM -0600, JP Maxwell wrote:


But if you wanted to upgrade everything, remove the mobile view


extension,


test in a dev/staging environment then deploy to production fingers
crossed, I think that would be a valid approach as well.



Current review up[1]. I'll launch a node tonight / tomorrow locally to


see
how


puppet reacts. I suspect there will be some issues.

If infra-roots are fine with this approach, we can use that box to test


against.


[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/285405/ [https://review.openstack.org/#/c/285405/]

J.P. Maxwell | tipit.net [http://tipit.net] | fibercove.com [http://fibercove.com]
On Feb 26, 2016 10:08 AM, "JP Maxwell"<jp at tipit.net> [jp at tipit.net] wrote:



Plus one except in this case it is much easier to know if our efforts


are


working on production because the spam either stops or not.

J.P. Maxwell | tipit.net [http://tipit.net] | fibercove.com [http://fibercove.com]
On Feb 26, 2016 9:48 AM, "Paul Belanger"<pabelanger at redhat.com> [pabelanger at redhat.com] wrote:



On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 09:18:00AM -0600, JP Maxwell wrote:


I really think you might consider the option that there is a


vulnerability


in one of the extensions. If that is the case black listing IPs will


be


an


ongoing wild goose chase.

I think this would be easily proven or disproven by making the questy
question impossible and see if the spam continues.



We'll have to let an infra-root make that call. Since nobody would be
able to
use the wiki. Honestly, I'd rather spend the time standing up a mirror


dev


instance for us to work on, rather then production.



J.P. Maxwell | tipit.net [http://tipit.net] | fibercove.com [http://fibercove.com]
On Feb 26, 2016 9:12 AM, "Paul Belanger"<pabelanger at redhat.com> [pabelanger at redhat.com]

wrote:


On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 08:10:34PM -0800, Elizabeth K. Joseph wrote:


On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 6:35 AM, Jeremy Stanley<fungi at yuggoth.org> [fungi at yuggoth.org]

wrote:


On 2016-02-25 02:46:13 -0600 (-0600), JP Maxwell wrote:


Please be aware that you can now create accounts under the mobile
view in the wiki native user table. I just created an account for
JpMaxMan. Not sure if this matters but wanted to make sure you
were aware.


Oh, yes I think having a random garbage question/answer was in


fact


previously preventing account creation under the mobile view. We
probably need a way to disable mobile view account creation as it
bypasses OpenID authentication entirely.


So that's what it was doing! We'll have to tackle the mobile view


issue.


Otherwise, quick update here:

The captcha didn't appear to help stem the spam tide. We'll want to
explore and start implementing some of the other solutions.

I did some database poking around today and it does seem like all


the


users do have launchpad accounts and email addresses.



So, I have a few hours before jumping on my plane and checked into


this.


We are
using QuestyCaptcha which according to docs, should almost be


impossible


for
spammers to by pass in an automated fashion. So, either our captcha


is too


easy, or we didn't set it up properly. I don't have SSH on wiki.o.o


so


others
will have to check logs. I did test new pages and edits, and was


promoted


by
captcha.

As a next step, we might need to add additional apache2


configuration


to


blacklist IPs. I am reading up on that now.



--
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2

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