News

Government Computer Linked to Hundreds of Anonymous Wikipedia Edits

Either someone employed at a Government facility has way to much time on his hand or some automatic process is running. One that is editing hundreds of Wikipedia entries each month, sometimes up to 90 a day and always during work hours. The edits themselves are harmless and mostly made to the fact boxes – a sidebar containing at-a-glance information on the open subject.

The fact boxes have been added to pages ranging from the Aviation Security Act 1982 to the British Homeopathic Association and on December 29th, the connection was used to make 95 edits in a single day. The unusual activity was discovered by the Twitter account WhitehallEdits that is set up by Channel 4 News to automatically tweet whenever a government owned IP address makes changes to Wikipedia.

The system has been very useful in the past and discovered the vandalism of the Hillsborough disaster Wikipedia page back in April. Now however, it has become more or less useless as the system is flooded with all these new edits every day.

A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office said it was impossible to tell which computer was making the edits, or even if they were being made by a single person as public facing IP addresses can be shared by numerous computers. They also told Mirror Online that they were unable to publish information which would confirm whether this IP address had been assigned to a particular Government department, or if it was in use by a local government agency.

But the edits are following a pattern and are edited in an alphabetical order. This suggest the work of a single entity rather than a group of users as suggested.

“Civil servants are required to use their time online responsibly and follow the Civil Service Code when working online,” said the Cabinet Office spokesperson

Thanks to Mirror Online for providing us with this information

 

Bohs Hansen

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

XPG Launches CORE REACTOR II VE PSU & VENTO PWM Fan Series

Today XPG have launched two new products, the CORE REACTOR II VE PSU available in…

1 hour ago

Bandai Namco Giving Away Free Steam Keys for Games by Novice Developers

Who doesn't love a free game? If you don't, stop reading, go elsewhere, this isn't…

3 hours ago

Horizon Forbidden West PC Update Changelog Released

I'm eager to get around to playing this one, I just need to find time…

3 hours ago

Dragon’s Dogma 2 First Patch is Here!

Dragon's Dogma 2 was going to be a day one purchase for me, and yes,…

3 hours ago

Twitch Now Banning All Content Focusing On Intimate Body Parts

As by now, I'm sure you are aware Twitch has decided to go ahead and…

20 hours ago

Second Patch of “Operation Medic Bag” For Payday 3 Released

I doubt many of you have been keeping up with Payday 3 which is understandable…

22 hours ago