Obama Wikipedia page under possible security attack?

Barack Obama’s web presence may have come under some pressure today as his Wikipedia page appeared to show signs of malfunction for a period between midday GMT and 12:45pm around the time of this blog posting.

A casual Google search for the term Obama brought up standard news results and his own dot com home pages. The fourth result was his Wiki entry, which appears to be the genuine site at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

In between repeated visits using both a Mac and a PC accessed from the US and the UK, Obama’s picture was periodically replaced with a distasteful image and on some occasions no image (in the mug shot frame) showed up at all.

One user in the UK reported that the page listed the following response: “This site is now semi protected indefinitely in response to an ongoing high risk of vandalism.”

The essentially collaborative nature of Wiki’s of course means that they are “open” to external third-party input; whether this was compromised today it is not known.

At the time of posting this blog, the page appears to be functioning normally again.