German Wikipedia Spreading Malware

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Some enterprising hackers took advantage of the openness of Wikipedia, using it to spread malicious code from a webpage that was supposed to give them info on a new version of the Blaster worm.

an article on the German edition of Wikipedia, de.wikipedia.org, was created by hackers claiming to include a link to a fix for a supposedly new version of the Blaster worm. However, the ‘fix’ was actually a piece of malicious code, designed to infect visitors’ PCs.

Hackers then spammed out an email to German computer users, claiming to come from Wikipedia, and directing them to information about the ‘new worm’. Source: Tech2.com

We Say: Wikipedia quickly identified and edited the article, but a version of the page was still in the archive was still available, so Wikipedia had to erase that page as well to clean itself of the malicious code. Always be careful which emails you open, if it’s a new virus, one would think a security firm would have the information about it way before Wikipedia did.