Antivirus vendor Sophos published a notice last Friday indicating that malicious code was being spread by way of the German version of Wikipedia. The code was found in links to a fix on the page for the “Lovesan/MSBlast worm.”
Though the site’s editors quickly deleted the links, those responsible for the attack were able to utilize the archived pages of the article. They used a mass e-mail to send German users to the misleading archived entry for “Lovesan/MSBlast,” and since the e-mails were linking to a valid site, they passed by some spam filters.
Since these developments, Wikipedia.de has now deleted all versions of the page.
While this ordeal was happening, Web activist Daniel Brandt used a program that he created to find 142 Wikipedia articles that included plagiarized material from other online resources.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, admitted that plagiarized content occasionally slips past the site’s administrators, but that Brandt’s discovery was exaggerated.
The site’s editors have been reviewing the 142 articles that Brandt brought to their attention, and have found that several were fine because they were copied from resources in the public domain.
Entries that were found to be plagiarized have been cut down dramatically, while some entries have yet to be checked.
Sources:
http://news.com.com/Wikipedia+used+to+spread+
malicious+code/2100-7349_3-6132733.html?tag=newsmap
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061103/ap_on_hi_te/
wikipedia_plagiarism
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