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Wikipedia Targeted By Malware Distributors
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-11-06
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The issue of trusting material on user-contributed websites took a turn on Wikipedia, with malicious links being placed on the well-known site.
 | | "Wikipedia Targeted" |  |
A downside to being open to users creating and editing pages became apparent when a malicious party posted a seemingly helpful page on Wikipedia. The criminals then turned to massively spamming people to draw them to the page.
Those spams were crafted to look like they had originated at Wikipedia, Heise Online reported. In the messages, a warning about a new version of a Windows virus called Lovesan/W32.Blaster claimed demand for a new patch was so great Microsoft's servers were overwhelmed.
The spam invited the recipient to visit a Wikipedia page about the virus. That page contained links to a domain, wikipedia-download.org, where the visitor could download the purported new patch. Contents of that download have not been identified, but likely contain some form of malware.
While the malicious page edits were detected and removed in short order, the malicious party was a step ahead of Wikipedia. The report noted how the MediaWiki software saves all versions of an article for change tracking. The editors deleted the most recent edited page, but not ones that had been archived, and the attackers linked to one of those older pages.
Eventually Wikipedians realized this had taken place and removed all versions of the article. One Wikipedia administrator, Andrew Lau, posted a comment on Digg that they have now blacklisted the wikipedia-download.org domain.
The episode illustrated a pretty clever manipulation of a user-edited website coupled with spamming and a plausible domain name that may have drawn in and fooled some people. Now that one party has tried to pull this, very likely for criminal reasons, others will probably make similar attempts.
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Tag: Wikipedia
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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