 Ahoy Hoy, I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today I'm going to have to talk about the problem on the SCP Wiki. The SCP Wiki is down now and has been since last Thursday morning, yeah, roughly Thursday morning. It was actually supposed to be up, the timeline we were given was Monday, so one would imagine that it would be today, but what we do know is that it has gone down and that the SCP Wiki, you know, I'm going to read to you real quick what the official statement is. On 19th of May 2022, Wikidot servers have been hit by hackers. All traces lead to the Russian Federation, and we'll talk more about that in a second. All the data, files and database are intact and no data loss has occurred. We are planning to bring Wikidot back on Monday. It takes a bit longer than we first anticipated because we are literally reinstalling the whole infrastructure to make sure hackers left no back doors. At the same time, we are updating most of the critical software too. Thank you for your patience and we humbly ask for some more. It's been a difficult day for us and it's far from over, so keep your fingers crossed. I will keep you posted on this page, Mikael and the Wikidot team. So the first moment that we kind of figured something serious might be going on is the fact that they actually tweeted about the problem. So Wikidot has been sort of coasting on, I don't know, what's the best way to put it, passive mode for quite some time. In 2016, one of the co-founders of Wikidot died of cancer and ever since then the sites just kind of not really, what's the best way to put it, it hasn't been developed further. I'm sure it's being supported, it's just not being developed further. And so it's kind of fell into a bit of a malaise. Well, the official Twitter hasn't really tweeted a lot since 2016, to be honest with you. In 2017 they posted a couple of times about outages, in 2018 they posted once about outages. And that was it for the last four years or so, but maybe three and a half years or so. They hadn't tweeted at all from the official account. And this is important in as much as that there have been plenty of other times where the SAP Wiki has gone offline and it's just been restored without any announcement. So when on Thursday they immediately, well not immediately, but very quickly tweeted, we are experiencing database issues and the whole Wikidot is offline, we are working to bring it up as soon as possible. That was a red flag to most of us who follow this sort of thing. And then a little bit later in the day the issues we are facing are far more severe. Rest assured we have up to minute backups and we'll restore them if needed. But otherwise please be patient, this can take hours. And then even more serious, Wikidot has been hit by hackers and all traces lead to Russian Federation. Well again, talk about that in a second. The data seems intact, but hackers left quite a mess. We need to scan literally everything to make sure Wikidot is secure before re-enabling it. It will take a while. We'll keep you posted. And then on Monday, good news. After a busy weekend we are going to bring Wikidot back online later today. And then later on Monday our database just gave us some serious chills. We have to restore the data once more because it appears inconsistent. No worries. We have two other safe backups, but we have to postpone Wikidot launch until Tuesday. One more day of patience for you and hard work for us. Take care. So there is a time we think it's going to be Tuesday, but we thought it was going to be Monday. And we also thought for a little while that it was going to be only a few hours on Thursday. And there is a lot to talk about with regards to this. I have very incomplete information and for strange reasons. It seems very clear that some people know what's going on, or at least have intimated to me that they do know what's going on. And also that collating and releasing publicly available data like this, like I've just done, is somehow harmful or potentially harmful. They won't explain to me why it's potentially harmful. Because they believe that explaining why would itself be potentially harmful. I don't know what any of these things mean. But that means I have incomplete information to make a video about. So I'm mostly just going to update you and give you the data that is publicly available and go from there. So the only other thing that we can really talk about with any level of certainty here is that there has been an announcement separately for anyone accessing Wikidot from Belarus or the Russian Federation. And I'm going to read this message in its entirety because, well, it's a pretty serious thing. Wikidot is not available in Russia and Belarus anymore. Following a recent hack on Wikidot servers conducted from the Russian territory, as well as a massive abuse of human rights, international laws and sovereignty of other countries, we've decided to block access to Wikidot to the following regions, Russian Federation and Belarus. We cannot stay quiet about the fact that over the last years, we've seen numerous abuse and hacking attempts of Wikidot services originating in Russian territory. Now, since the start of war in Ukraine, these incidents increased in numbers and started posing a real threat. We cannot accept the fact that such attacks on foreign companies and institutions are silently approved or even encouraged by the Russian state. As a result, we cannot provide services in countries that do not respect common human values and at the same time pose a threat to Wikidot itself. Although we believe there are good people in both Russia and Belarus are decision to block Wikidot as a direct result of recent abuse and hacking events and state level policies of these countries, the Wikidot team. So this statement needs to be better. I don't think Wikidot really has a PR person and if they do, they're not doing a very good job here. So if you examine this in a sort of a vacuum, you might think to yourself, anyone who has the capacity to hack Wikidot isn't going to care if Russia and Belarus are banned from accessing Wikidot. The only people that would affect are the basic users. Well, there is a yes and no to that. On the one hand, this is going to disproportionately affect the average users, people who have nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, people who have nothing to do with the hacks on Wikidot and all these other things. But there is some value or at least value to the argument that state level policies have led to this problem. But it's a misleading way of putting it when you say that hacking attempts of Wikidot services originating in Russian territory. It doesn't necessarily originate in Russian territory. However, because of Russian policies on this sort of thing and a general inability to actually or not inability necessarily, but maybe a lack of will to enforce certain laws on these particular points, routing through Russian territory is usually a good idea for people who don't have access to their own private ways to avoid, you know, identifying where they're from. So if you completely block that off, then there is an argument to be made for it. I'm not going to go into too much detail on this, because again, I don't know exactly what has happened here. There is another big thing that I need to talk about, but I don't exactly what has happened here, but the S.C.P. Russia branch released a statement before this yesterday. I'm going to read it in its entirety too, because it's important. Wikidot hacked on May 19th. Wikidot started experiencing another problem. It seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. However, these problems lasted much longer than usual. Soon, an announcement about the hack appeared on the official Wikidot Twitter account on the site itself. The company claimed that it was the work of a certain group of hackers from the territory of Russia. So what actually happened? Detailed information was provided to Rufon's bulletin. That's the little sort of news posting that we're talking about here by a user called Revolt. Revolt is a specialist in how Wikidot works and finds its vulnerabilities. Now, I'm not making any claims as the veracity of any of these documents that I'm reading, but I'm just reporting what I know or I should say what I have access to. According to him, when the Wikidot servers crashed again, he decided to take the opportunity, penetrate the system and began to look for the reasons for the unstable operation of the hosting. When the administration of Wikidot discovered the penetration into the system, it completely blocked access to its resources. Since the revolt action came from a remote server located in Russia, then the path from where the penetration was completed, pointed to there. According to Revolt, he had no malicious intentions. On the contrary, he was trying to make the service work better. A full picture of what has happened is already known to the administration. The translation software goes Anglophon. That's probably English Foundation or the English branch of the SCP Foundation, which is the main wiki. It's the primary and original wiki and representatives of the there's a there's an international SCP like news announcements sort of thing, sort of like a thread. But it's a little bit more complex than that. The details are not particularly important. So and I would also argue that what Wikidot has done and what some people have already started to do, and that's blaming Russia in general, is probably premature until we have more information. However, what we what sequence of events seems to be is if we include this along with everything else is that Wikidot failed on its own. That the user Revolt decided to do penetration testing during this time without telling anyone, which does happen, but is a terrible idea. Got into the servers, Wikidot noticed and then shut everything down and spent the last few days trying to piece together how to avoid such exploits in the future. And then also as a result of this decided to, you know, ban Russia and Belarus from the SCP or the SCP wiki bit from Wikidot entirely. Now, this is important because there is a whole Russian branch of the SCP wiki run by Russian users and administrators. And it's it's it's all of the other foreign branches are much smaller than the SCP wiki, but some of them are quite significant. There was a time for sure where the Russian branch of the SCP wiki was probably the largest international or at least non main site branch. I don't know if it's necessarily still true, but it was definitely true at one point. I don't know what the best way to put this, but I feel like this is an overreaction by Wikidot and a pretty good explanation of why we should definitely start thinking about moving to our own system. But that's neither here nor there. I just wanted to give you guys an update and what's going on as best as I know it. If I get more information, I actually plan on making a video at some future point, one where you'll actually be able to see my face while I'm doing this, but it'll include more opinions and also hopefully more details as they come out. But it may not be immediately. And I thought this was important at least to get the information out there as to what's going on and when it's going to come back and maybe a little bit of why it happened. So that's it. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next. That's your notified when I upload new videos. And then head on over to patreon.com forward slash De Semerian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Sanjiriki, who is pledged at $100. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on Thursday.