Wikipedia Hijacked (Briefly)

[Lyte]

Dang, no place is safe!

Wikipedia Hijacked (Briefly)
Malware writers plant fake virus fix through Wikipedia entry, e-mail referrals.
Matthew Broersma, Techworld.com
Monday, November 06, 2006 07:00 AM PST

Malware writers have used a Wikipedia article and special storage features to attempt to plant malicious code on unsuspecting users' systems, the online encyclopedia's organizers have confirmed.

Pointed to Archive
The incident took advantage of Wikipedia's policy of openness, which allows anyone to create and modify articles. The attackers created a Wikipedia page that promised a Windows security update for a supposedly new version of the Lovesan/W32.Blaster worm, and pointed to an external site with the seemingly authentic domain wikipedia-download.org.

Wikipedia editors quickly identified and deleted the article, according to a report from German news organization Heise. However, the attackers had used a Wikipedia feature that archives all previous versions of articles when changes have been made.

The malicious page thus continued to exist in the archive, and the attackers were able to point to it in mass e-mail messages, according to Heise.

The e-mail messages used Wikipedia's logo, and explained that Microsoft had asked Wikipedia to assist with hosting the patch during a supposed Lovesan/W32.Blaster outbreak.

Wikipedia confirmed it has now deleted the archived versions of the malicious article. Wikipedia-download.org also leads to a dead end.

Quality Sought Amid Quantity
In August, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, addressing the Wikimania conference, acknowledged growing problems for the encyclopedia around accuracy and malicious edits, and promised to improve quality.

The English version of Wikipedia passed 1 million entries this year.

[mknapper1]

I use this site like everyday. It had wonderfully content that is updated all of the time. hopefully this doesn't make them put restrcitons on it because that would just lead to less posting on their site

[Noner]

Things like this shows, that Wikipedia is very very easy to fall and it's not so strong. It was nice, that this case was solved, but maybe some another will not be solved. The problem with wikipedia it's, that it's so editful. Anybody can edit it, and hide there things like these, heh. I donno, if it's even so good to use it. Myself I would prefer the some encyclopedia.

Wikipedia it's very important database of information these days. Many million peoples trust it and so many students use it. The wikipedia information can be anyway very very untrustful. I writed in my school article with my language, which is not english, an article about wikipedia and the untrustful of it.

[bbalegere]

I can't believe that wikipedia was hacked.
I will defintely be careful next time when I look for info in wikipedia.