Wikipedia and Viruses
I cannot say I’m surprised by this. In fact, it’s probably happened many times before. From VNUnet:
Hackers use Wikipedia to spread malware
Beware geeks bearing gifts
Hackers are using online encyclopaedia Wikipedia to spread malware, according to a security firm.
Sophos discovered that hackers had created an article on the German edition of Wikipedia containing false information about a new version of the Blaster worm, along with a link to a fix.
However, the fix is actually a piece of malicious code designed to infect visitors’ PCs.
[...]
“The good news is that the authorities at Wikipedia quickly identified and edited the article on their site,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.
“Unfortunately, a version of the page remained in the archive, allowing the hackers to send spam and continue to direct visitors to the malicious code.”
Wikipedia has now confirmed that it has permanently erased all versions of the page.
This is one problem of the “infinite undo” of the edit history, but Wikipedia does have ways to erase it from the database in cases like this, and serious copyright violations.
