[WikiEN-l] Shock site bot

[Peter Mackay]

> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org 
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Brett Gustafson
> Sent: Thursday, 3 November 2005 11:23
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Shock site bot
> 
> ...But I recently heard of these people 
> that were talking about wikipedia that they were all 
> programming a hack for it. So after a little while I found it 
> was a spider to hunt down all the pages links and change them 
> to shocks site links or something along those lines.

There's something about this message that doesn't quite ring true to me (and
no, it's not the Nigerian spelling), but in case it's genuine, it doesn't
seem to be much of a threat - anything like this is going to be noticed very
quickly, the IP address swiftly blocked, and the pages repaired.

In case it is somehow programmed to be resistant to our normal defence
measures, then maybe we could have a white-hat robot searching for the links
inserted by the black-hat and reverting them.

Peter (Skyring)