How a Hacker Made Diana Nyad the Best Marathon Swimmer of the 1970s

Prologue

I became, in the 1970s, the best ocean swimmer in the world. I held every major record on planet earth, out in the open sea.
—Diana Nyad, 7 Oct 2019

While compiling a list of the real best ocean swimmers of the decade, I headed over to Openwaterpedia—”the Wikipedia for the open water swimming world”—for more data about listees. I began with Lynne Cox and Tina Bischoff. Cox set English Channel records in 1972 and ’73, Bischoff in ’76. But something was off with their Openwaterpedia entries: they showed Cox and Bischoff swimming the English Channel in the sixties. As a matter of fact, their entries showed neither of them completing a single swim in the 1970s.

I assumed this to be an isolated problem. Just in case, though, I visited Sandra Bucha’s page. Bucha dominated pro swimming between 1973 and 1975. She won every race she entered, beating Diana Nyad by at least thirty minutes whenever they went head to head. Once, Bucha beat Nyad by over three hours.

According to Openwaterpedia, Sandra Bucha hadn’t completed a single race in the 1970s:

Details from Sandra Bucha’s Openwaterpedia page from before and just after the hacker struck. Note that Bucha would have been ten years old in 1964.

So I visited the entries for all of the best swimmers of the decade. With only two exceptions, none of them had completed a single swim in the 1970s as far as Openwaterpedia was concerned.

Eventually, I learned that…

  1. A vandal hiding behind multiple accounts sabotaged thousands of entries. The culprit may have had programming help, but there was a sole instigator.
  2. The vandal sabotaged all of those pages in the service of a single goal: erase from the 1970s all the swims of the greatest swimmers of the era. With that done, Diana Nyad could reasonably declare herself the best marathon swimmer of the decade.

Briefly, here’s how the hacker did it. He or she used a simple but ingenious algorithm to zero in on the entries of swimmers from the 1970s: the vandal changed every “7” to a “6.” This effectively moved all seventies swims into the sixties. The algorithm made other edits too—for instance, changing every “3” to a “4”—but the hacker used those alterations to help divert attention from the real targets.

Note: Some very knowledgeable people disagree with my theory regarding the vandal’s purpose. Please read on and let me know what you think.

The Details

For the whole story, we need to go back to the beginning of Openwaterpedia.

On May 9, 2011, Steven Munatones, Openwaterpedia’s creator and primary administrator, registers Openwaterpedia’s first username, “Admin.” On the same day, the Admin account makes the first entry in Openwaterpedia’s Patrol log.

Seven years later, on January 31, 2019, at 12:03 p.m., patrolling—the reviewing of changes to pages on a wiki—abruptly ends. Within minutes, bots begin registering thousands of spam usernames.

Two weeks later, the vandal creates four accounts—Jolyn12, MarcyMacD, AlexArevalo, and GlennMiller. These account names establish that the vandal knows his or her way around marathon swimming:

  • Jolyn12: Jolyn Clothing, women’s swimsuit maker. Site / OWP
  • MarcyMacD: Marcy MacDonald, Triple-Crown swimmer. MSF / OWP
  • AlexArevalo: Alex Arévalo, New York Open Water board member. NYOW
  • GlennMiller: Glenn Miller, bandleader and musician who “was the best-selling recording artist from 1939 to 1942.” He disappeared over the English Channel in 1944 (Wikipedia).

In April, the culprit will create two more accounts:

<°))̂)̖)><    ><((̗(̂(°>

The vandal creates the first four accounts on February 15 between 11:20 a.m. and 12:00 noon. Before finishing up, however, the hacker uses the AlexArevalo account to test the waters:

Then the saboteur lays low for six days, perhaps to make sure that no one’s watching. Satisfied that no one is, the serious experimenting begins. On February 21 at 4:20 p.m. (a little joke?), the Jolyn12 account makes its first edit, adding a legitimate link — http://www.openwaterswimming.com — to the page of ice swimmer Gerrit Curcio.

A Helen Siegl illustration for Gwendlolyn Reed’s book, Adam and Eve.

A few hours later, Jolyn12 moves on to Adam Moine. The vandal has decided to make Adam — another joke? — his test subject. The saboteur wants to perfect a program that will visit a page, find every occurrence of one specific number, then change it to another specific number.

In just over half an hour, Jolyn12 edits Moine’s page four times:

  • 7:07 p.m.: Adds Daily News of Open Water Swimming (DNOWS) link. [comparison]
  • 7:11 p.m.: Runs a program that changes every “3” to a “4.” The program also changes every “a” to a “4” and every “b” to a “3.”

  • 7:14 p.m.: Undoes last revision, probably because it overshot the goal. The vandal doesn’t strike again for 25 minutes, plenty of time to revise some code.
  • 7:39 p.m.: Runs a new version that does nothing but change every “3” to a “4.” Bingo!

On March 2, the saboteur prepares a new substitution, the one that will dredge a decade for Diana. Jolyn12 visits the page of Brazilian swimmer Abilio Couto and, for the first time, changes every “7” to a “6.”

Now the real erasing can begin. Under the guise of Jolyn12 and, later, KCassidy, the vandal alters 3318 pages.

S/he makes too many changes in too short a time, however, to have made them all manually. The majority of the changes, then, had to have been made by a bot:

BOTS: According to the MediaWiki manual (both Openwaterpedia and Wikipedia run on the MediaWiki platform), “Bots are automated tools that can be used to perform tedious work or certain repetitive tasks related to a wiki.” Bots can also be used for vandalism. For a bot to gain access to a wiki, an administrator must approve that access.

The main vandalism begins on February 21 with Jolyn12 and continues through March and April, finishing up with a KCassidy spree. Below are the number of pages that the Jolyn12 and KCassidy accounts edited. The other four vandal accounts struck only 12 pages in all.

Feb 21 Mar 2-4 April 15 April 20-24
Jolyn12 8 241 256 –
KCassidy – – – 2813

Jolyn12 and KCassidy used the same algorithm, so we can infer that a single saboteur implemented the scheme.

The Jolyn12 account made all of its significant changes on March 3 and 4. By sandwiching those changes between the February and April attacks, the vandal made the fifteen main targets almost impossible to spot.

Our saboteur, however, was not all business. Perhaps beginning with “4:20” and “Adam,” the vandal displayed a sense of humor.  The TomBell account visited Antonio Argüelles’s page and  changed the words “car,” “finance,” “education,” “talks,” “standards,”  “videos,” and “degrees” to the word “hamburgers.” The same account changed the phrase “indomitable spirit” to “delicious hamburgers.”  And, in a demonstration of lingual respect, it changed both“[D]esarollo” and “grado” to “hamburguesa.”

To add to the fun, someone—perhaps the hacker creating another diversion—opened almost 40,000 spam accounts in 2019.  By comparison, only 17 spam accounts popped up in all of the previous three years. (I call them “spam” accounts because few if any edited entries other than their own user pages. They damaged no pages.) Among the spam accounts, the vandal—if it was, in fact, the same culprit—scattered humorous usernames like SeymourBzm, Dauphindudésert (“Desert dolphin”), and  TahliaSnowball.

Tahlia’s snowball, via Lisa Boni’s Ivory Blush Roses: Crazy Quilting and Beyond.

The Targets: (Almost) All of the Best of the ’70s

With two exceptions, the hacker sabotaged the pages of all but two International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (IMSHOF) inductees active in the 1970s.

Here’s who got changed:

 

 

 

 

Did the Vandal visit Diana?

Yes! For the vandal’s overall plan to work, Nyad’s 1970s swims had to remain in their decade-of-origin. But the hacker also wanted Nyad’s page to appear to have been sabotaged along with everyone else. So the vandal hit Nyad’s page twice:

March 3, 10:39 p.m.:
Jolyn12 moves all of Nyad’s 1970s swims into the 1960s.
March 3, 10:48 p.m.:
Jolyn12 moves all of Nyad’s 1970s swims back to the 1970s.

Of the 3318 pages that Jolyn12 and KCassidy damaged, they reverted only fifteen. Of those fifteen, Nyad’s was the only entry for a swimmer active in the 1970s.

Repercussions for the IMSHOF

The vandal sabotaged the pages of over 75% of IMSHOF swimming inductees. The IMSHOF website links its honorees to each of their Openwaterpedia entries. Visitors to the IMSHOF site assume that its information is reliable. Between March and November last year, much of it was not.

Openwaterpedia didn’t begin repairing the damage in earnest until mid-November. Up to that point, an IMSHOF site visitor researching marathon swimming would have found that Diana Nyad was one of the greatest marathon swimmers of the seventies. I imagine that most of those visitors—students, journalists, other interested parties—wouldn’t have thought to look elsewhere to confirm Openwaterpedia’s data.

Munatones has apparently taken steps to limit future damage to Openwaterpedia. Site administrators now receive notifications whenever a user edits a page. They have corrected the errors to the entries for IMSHOF inductees, but the damage to thousands of other pages remains.

Some Pages the Vandal Skipped

Excellent ’70s marathoners not in the IMSHOF:

Two more

Of all the greatest swimmers of the seventies, the vandal only skipped two: Penny Dean and Cindy Cleveland. I can’t say for sure why the hacker let them be. What I can say for sure is that, during the 1970s, Penny and Cindy were both Southern California-based marathon swimmers and that they often trained with Steven. I can also say that Steven once called Penny his idol. Perhaps whoever hacked Openwaterpedia, then, thought it best to leave Penny and Cindy alone.

Cindy Cleveland, another SoCal idol candidate,  finishing the first-ever Anacapa double (1978). She had completed a Catalina double the year before. In 1979, she became the first person to swim around Catalina.
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