Help:Login notifications

Hi there! Are you here because you received a notification about a login attempt to your account? Calm down, your account is still secure.

What is this?
You received a notification because someone attempted (and failed) to log in to your account either -
 * 1) From a device/browser you haven't used previously at least once
 * 2) From a known device/browser at least five times

This feature has been recently rolled out by the Community Tech team as requested in the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey -- Warning on unsuccessful login attempts. The project aims to improve security on Wikimedia sites by notifying users when there are unsuccessful attempts to login with their username from both known and unknown IPs and devices. This project builds on the LoginNotify extension which was created by Brian Wolff in 2016.

What should I do?
Common sense dictates that you have a fairly strong password for your account. If you don't think this is the case, you should go ahead and change the password as soon as possible. According to one study of leaked account passwords, nearly 17% of 10 million internet user accounts have "123456" as their password. Don't be one of them! Also, it might be a good idea to go ahead and associate an email ID with your account in the event you lose access to your account and want to get back in. You might also want to glance through - this essay on how to prevent account hijacking which has some general tips you should keep in mind when using the world wide web.

How does this feature work?
The extension keeps track of known devices (browsers really) by placing a cookie in the browser. This cookie automatically expires in 180 days. If a failed login attempt happens from a new browser, it generates an Echo notification alerting the user about the login attempt. The other way that we identify known devices is by checking the current IP address subnet against the IP addresses that have been used recently (as stored in a temporary server cache). None of the information is stored in a database and at no point is any private information revealed publicly, including the attacker’s IP address/location. The WMF Legal and Security teams have reviewed the implementation for both compliance with our Privacy Policy and security considerations.

For known devices/IPs, we allow up to 5 login attempts before alerting the user about the login attempt, since it's fairly common to mistype or forget a password. If there are 5 or more failed attempts, the notification will say: "There have been 5 failed attempts to log in to your account since the last time you logged in. If this wasn't you, please make sure your account has a strong password." There would be another notification at 10 attempts, 15 attempts and so on.



For unknown devices/IPs, we alert on every failed attempt. The extension bundles these notifications to avoid spamming users with too many notifications. For example, if there are 3 failed attempts from an unknown device, there will be a single notification, which says: "There have been 3 failed attempts to log in to your account from a new device since the last time you logged in. If this wasn't you, please make sure your account has a strong password." On further attempts, that notification would update to say "4 failed attempts," "5 failed attempts", and so on.

How do the notifications look?
The first picture on the right is what the notification looks like if the attack happened on the wiki that you're currently on; the second picture is what it would look like if you view it on a different wiki. The notification is issued from the wiki where the attack happened.

There are two ways for the user to get these notifications - either by web Echo notifications or by email. By default, the web notifications are on for everyone and email ones are turned off. This is configurable in the notification preferences.

The text for the notifications as well as the threshold for when you get the notifications is subject to changes, based on your feedback.

This extension does not give you notifications when somebody successfully logs into your account from an unknown device or IP. It is technically possible to generate those, but if somebody else has logged in, they could just as easily see those notifications and do a password reset (which the notification encourages you to do). The ideal way to handle this is to issue email notifications for this case, but since most Wikipedia accounts do not have emails associated with them, this wouldn't be useful to majority of the users. So for the time being, we have settled for not issuing these notifications.