Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-11-06/In the news

In the news

Wikipedia in the news

Hackers claim to use Wikipedia

Many computer magazines reported that hackers tried to trade on Wikipedia's reputation to distribute virus/worm programs. The attack is described as a standard phishing attack. An official looking email with a link to a fraudulent site is distributed to users. When the user clicks the link they are directed to the fraudulent site that looks like Wikipedia but is instead the distributor of the worm. See The Age, Information Week, Forbes.com blog, and Heise Online.

Coverage of Brandt complaints

The Sydney Morning Herald covered the criticisms of Daniel Brandt concerning articles on Wikipedia that contain copyrighted material. However, the article notes that a "fair few" of the articles identified by Brandt had material which came from the public domain. See also articles by the St Paul Pioneer Press and the Inquirer.

Teenager cited for Wikipedia threat against high school

Chicago-area media reported on the arrest of a local high school student who had tried to post on Wikipedia with a threat of Halloween violence at the school. A Wikipedia administrator warned the school and they increased security for the day, but police concluded that there was no real danger.

Wales on NPR

Jimmy Wales made his second appearance on National Public Radio in as many weeks. After being interviewed about his $100-million copyright fund idea 26 October on Talk of the Nation, Wales was a guest on the program Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! last Saturday, 4 November. Wales was featured as part of the "Not My Job" segment, in which celebrities answer questions unrelated to their work. Playing on the fact that it is "not his job" to personally write all of Wikipedia, the trivia questions were based on actual information taken from Wikipedia articles. And perhaps fittingly, to demonstrate that it truly isn't his job, he got none of the three questions correct.

Intellipedia

Coverage of the use of Wiki software, dubbed Intellipedia, by United States Intelligence Community was reported on by several news outlets (see related story). Articles were carried by The Washington Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Pakistan Daily Times amongst others.

Last political shots before election

The New Yorker had an article, "Dirty Wikitricks", covering some of the negative campaigning going on in the U.S. elections, including back-and-forth on Wikipedia articles. The race for a seat representing New Jersey in the Senate between Bob Menendez and Tom Kean was particularly noted, with claims made that some edits were coming from Kean campaign offices (a spokeswoman denied involvement and said the edits could have been made by any volunteer passing through the office).

Also this week: Arbitration series — Search and Wikipedia — Intellipedia — German Wikipedia — News and notes — Press coverage — Features and admins — Arbitration

In this issue

6 November 2006 (all comments)

In the news

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"The attack is described as a standard phishing attack." Was it really described like that? Because that description would be false. The attack was non-standard in that the attacker managed to insert a link to their phishing site into a relevant Wikipedia article. The link was promptly removed, but in their phishing email they simply linked to the old version of the Wikipedia article containing the link. Eventually, the offending article version was completely removed. All of this happened in the German Wikipedia, in the article on the virus W32 Blaster. AxelBoldt 22:42, 7 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I used the phishing word (the article did not) but I think it was justified based on this description "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."

I was looking for some way to quickly explain what was happening. It sounds like it was a variant of phishing since according to some of the other news reports the link was to a specific version of the article on de.wikipedia.org rather than to a "bogus edition" which I assumed was a downloaded mirror of wikipedia with the malicious code on their website. I'll look into it some more later, but be bold as I could be mistaken. --Trödel 22:52, 7 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]