The British Techno-savvy Environment Secretary, David Miliband, promoted an initiative to publish a draft "environment contract" on his department’s website that turned out to be a tasty occasion for cyber-jokers to practise their sense of humour at Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs’ (DEFRA) expense. 

Few hours after the publication, dozens of attacks were launched against the website, and the document was jeopardized by a series of fake paragraphs added for fun.

The heading "Who are the parties to the environmental contract?" became, "Where is the party for the environmental contract? Can I come? Will there be cake? Hooray!" ...

Then, the question of "what tools can be used to deliver the environmental contract?" received the answer: "Spade, Organic Yoghurt Stirrer, Old washing up liquid bottle, Sticky Back Plastic."

Meanwhile, a list including tools that "create the right incentive frameworks" was sophisticated to include "Big stick" and "Owl magnet."

Some of the interventions were oriented to strongly criticize English government, for example, under a list of things citizens should do, it was added: "Pay a higher proportion of their income to the government, and see little tangible improvement in their standard of living." 

The reason why there were so many intrusions, was in the structure of the document’s page itself that used an editing technique which is very similar to the one of Wikipedia, that is, all the users with basic skills could get into the page and do whatever they wanted with the content.

After trying to handle the attacks without blacking the website out, the administrators realized that the amount of the attacks was too big, and finally they were forced into action.

The original page was darkened and a message was left for late cyber-jokers: "Please note -- the Wiki has been 'locked' for the time being to prevent editing.”

A part from smiling for this surreal situation, we have  to focus on the fact that the jeopardized page, was an official document released by a governmental department.
It was a mere draft, of course, but we would have expected a little more care by a Governmental Institution, considering all the Security breaches and data theft that are happening these days.

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