People can, and have, externally linked to malicious
software from our sites.
I remember the time that hit the news about three months ago, and
almost all outlets wrote the software was actually uploaded to our
site.
Of course, that can happen anywhere on the net and
users (and their
browser software) should be smart enough not to execute such code, but
Wikipedia looks rather respectable so people may be more inclined to
bypass security measures based on something on our site.
Okay, so none of this stuff would be automatically loading, it would
all be "This site is requesting you activate ****.*** [Yes] [No]" sort
of thing?
At the moment there are 209 external links to .exe
files from the main
namespace of English Wikipedia.
Is there a list of where these links are, so they can be reviewed? Or
have they indeed already been reviewed? If they're linking to freeware
or open source programs, for example, they likely should all be
linking to a product page, not directly to the download.