Thousands of Wikipedia celebrity pages were hacked and replaced with a black Nazi swastika on a red background.
Early Monday morning, Wikipedia pages with artistic celebrities, writers and politicians were replaced by a black Nazi swastika on a bright red background. The pages returned within minutes after the changes were noticed by users.
Wikipedia certainly isn't foreign in hacking some of its most controversial pages, but this incident highlighted one of its lesser-known weaknesses. Instead of the hack targeting the content on any particular Wikipedia page, target a particular article template, used by more than 50.000 different Wikipedia pages, including pages that link to Jennifer Lopez, Joe Biden, and author Terry Pratchett.
Wow - go to Wikipedia now! Looks like it's been hacked. pic.twitter.com/wVKCriERjD
- Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 16
According to a discussion of Wikipedia administrators, on one of the site's public forums, the template has been fixed and the hacker in question, who first came to the site about ten days ago, has been banned from access indefinitely.
One administrator noted that by targeting these article templates directly, the hacker was able to bypass the standard protections placed on certain Wikipedia pages to protect them from vandalism.
It was also reported that administrators have intervened to protect templates used by tens of thousands of pages.
