XZ Utils backdoor saw 244x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

On 29 March 2024, a malicious backdoor was discovered in the compression software XZ Utils. The backdoor gives an attacker who possesses a specific private key the ability to remotely execute code on an affected system through OpenSSH, a set of networking utilities. The backdoor was discovered by software developer Andres Freund.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "XZ Utils backdoor", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.