The Trust Trap: Wikipedia's 695,000-Link Problem and What It Teaches Us About Third-Party Dependency Risk

In February 2026 Wikipedia banned the archive.today service after its operator embedded malicious JavaScript in CAPTCHA pages that conscripted visitors into a DDoS against a blogger and was also found to have tampered with archived snapshots; the decision requires removal or replacement of roughly 695,000 links and highlights the systemic risk of opaque, single-operator third-party dependencies.