Worms Plague Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s reputation continues to a hit, with a report in the Information Weekly, which finds that the publicly written and edited encyclopedia has suffered from issues around plagiarism, hackers and worms.
While plagiarism may not be an issue, the one around hackers and worms seems to be.
Hackers created a bogus German edition of Wikipedia, de.wikipedia.org, which featured a link promising protection against the new version of Blaster worm. The link actually included malicious code, created to infect PCs, according to SophosLabs. Hackers then sent German computer users spam that appeared to come from Wikipedia and included warnings about the worm. It linked to the fake Wikipedia page.
Both the fake pages and archives of the pages have since been deleted, with SophosLabs issuing warnings about being careful about email messages. One wonders if social media and web applications have particular weakness from a security point of view, and could the openness of site such as Wikipedia be exploited in a new way that might herald a malicious future for all social media?
Yikes — it might just be the needle the bubble was hoping to avoid.
