WikiAbuse
From UoWiki
As wikis become more mainstream, they will become more attractive targets for malicious coders. The present security measures are weak and Wiki Philosophy leans towards extreme openness. Many wikis do not restrict the freedom to edit in any way.
Contents |
[edit] Possible goals of abuse
- System crash
- Removing information
- Falsifying information
- Adding unwanted information (e.g. adverts)
- Misattributing authorship
- Harassment
- Planting evidence
- Stashing for later
[edit] Forms of abuse
- Intentional abusive edits
- Deletions, falsifications, simple vandalism
- Wiki spam
- Using the Wiki as a remote cache
- Porn, access codes and other illegal data
- Viral code fragments
- Viruses that cause PCs to perform edits
- Automatic text replacement in revert wars
- Automatically changing name references using a find and replace function
- Automatic insertion of advert links using keywords in the text
[edit] Ways to address
- Lock pages
- Wikipedia solution in revert war situations
- Defeats point of wiki for those pages
- Ban user
- Dial up connections get around it
- Ineffective if the problem is caused by infected PCs
- Require login
- Stunts wiki growth
- Repair
- Cannot compete with automatic attacks
- Does not prevent attack
- Ignore
- Not a solution to the problem
- Even at a low level, a gradual cumulative effect
[edit] Repairing wikispam
- Text search for spam terms to pull up a list of pages that need fixing?
- Spam appears to come in waves on specific days, so, looking at RecentChanges one can find all the pages edited on a particular day
- Sometimes spam is authored by a given author which can be spotted easily
- Reparing spam consists in opening each page, looking at Diff and using the Revert function which brings the page to its earlier (pre-spam) version
