Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment--20151004230850/@comment-166269-20151006083310

Citrusellaeditswikis wrote: Energy X wrote: Isn't it odd how the person KNEW how to control Wikias. Unless there are giant buttons that allow a Staff Member to shut the Wiki or convert it to a redirect, I find it all quite suspicious.

Though Wikia isn't a vanilla wiki install (I'm assuming), it's not out of the realm of possibility that someone well-versed in MediaWiki (which is freely available) could quite easily do it on an account with the right permissions. (Plus what others have mentioned about the possibility it really is a big button.) In addition, virtually all of Wikia's modifications to MediaWiki, as well as the vast majority of Wikia-specific extensions and other code, are publicly viewable on Wikia's Github account and probably elsewhere. There are a number of ways attackers could gain the knowledge necessary to perform a wide variety of attacks just from this public information (though to be clear, I am not saying this is because there are weaknesses in the software; any such attack would generally require privileged access, as these last two attacks have with compromised staff/special role accounts).