I was checking the Wayback Machine through Google on a recently deleted diary, to see whether it had been cached, and couldn’t get through to the site. This is from Bleeping Computer, 15 hours ago. The hack likely occurred on September 28th; the DDoS attacks occurred on the 8th, and again Wednesday night, and the site appears to be unavailable currently.
Internet Archive's "The Wayback Machine" has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records.
News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached.
"Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!," reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site.
I’m not going to paraphrase the rest of the article — Bleeping Computer doesn’t have a paywall up, at least on this article, and there are more than a few other current articles under the Search “Wayback Machine”
Also see The Stack article for more detail on the DDoS attacks — warning — this looks legitimate, but there are more than a few hints of someone, likely the attackers, playing with Conspiracy Theories to give a false rationale for the attacks. Take that part with a pound or so of salt, if you read it...
One interesting part, to me at least, is the news a couple of weeks ago that Google was partnering with the Internet Archive to allow direct access to cached articles to replace the Google cache feature that was recently removed from URL lookups. One part of my own speculation wonders whether somebody was objecting to Google growing it’s Search ability in that way.
Although the original hacking story has been around for a few days, it seems to have taken off in the last 24 hours from the DDoS attacks, and jumped to the MSM this morning.
Addendum:
(Note: this page is currently available — probably on separate servers. If you’re interested in preserving a priceless treasure, even if there are arguments about copyright usage —
The Internet Archive is a small non-profit library with a huge mission: to give everyone access to all knowledge, forever. For free. Together we are building a special place where you can read, learn and explore. The Internet Archive has only 150 staff but runs the #250 website in the world. Reader privacy is very important to us, so we don’t share your personal information. We don’t accept ads. But we still need to pay for servers, staff and rent. That’s where you can help us. If you find our site useful, please give what you can today. Thank you.
Google blurb: Internet Archive funding status:
The Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit operating in the United States. In 2019, it had an annual budget of $37 million, derived from revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the Kahle-Austin Foundation. The Internet Archive also manages periodic funding campaigns.
