The Internet Archive is back online after being hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which brought down the digital library and Wayback Machine last week, but it is only available in a read-only state.
On October 9, a data breach and DDoS attack kicked the site offline, and the user authentication database containing 31 million unique records was stolen.
Fortunately, the Internet Archive is back online in a “provisional, read-only manner.” According to the X post by founder Brewster Kahle, “Safe to resume, but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.”
Users can access the 916 billion web pages already saved by the website, but adding news pages to the archives is still unavailable as per the founder.
It is reported that Kahle and the team have been trying to restore Archive.org services, which includes bringing back the team’s email accounts and its crawlers for National Libraries. The main services are unavailable so the team can examine the site and prepare it for future attacks.
Last week, reports found a pop-up from a purported hacker that said, “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!”
Later, HIBP, or Have I Been Pwned, a public database of security breaches for the uninitiated, confirmed that huge data were stolen. This data included account information of 31 million unique email accounts, email addresses, screen names, hashed passwords, and other internal data.
For now, the site is back to normal, and Wayback Machine can process 1,500 requests per second.
We hope that the Internet Archive can bounce back from these attacks and fight back against hackers in both the legal and cybersecurity spheres.
