Archive.today: Operator uses users for DDoS attack - Archive website accuses Finnish blogger of doxing him, sends DDOS in retaliation

Link (official translation from original German version)
Archive

The anonymous operator of Archive.today is unknowingly using visitors to their website in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against a Finnish blogger. On a splash page, which is intended to keep bots away using Google reCaptcha, JavaScript is hidden that sends an HTTP request to the Gyrovague.com page every 300 milliseconds in the user's browser. The background of the attack is apparently a disliked blog post by the affected party. Behind the attacked URL is the blog of Finn Janni Patokallio, who published the results of research on Archive.today in a post in 2023. German users who use Archive.today are thus operating in a legal gray area and could be committing a criminal offense, says a specialist lawyer for IT law.

The operator of Archive.today explained to a security researcher that the DDoS attack is intended to “slightly” increase the Finn's hosting costs. He feels “doxxed” by his blog post and is reacting to it with the DDoS attack. In the official Tumblr blog of Archive.today, which was recently posted on for the first time in two years, Patokallio and his family are sharply attacked. The post makes confused connections between Patokallio, an alleged Nazi past of his grandfather, arms trafficking, and Ukraine.

Blocks against media companies
The operator of Archive.today could not be reached by heise online via the email address provided on the site. In his Tumblr blog, he writes that he has blocked offices of the publisher Condé Nast because they published “propaganda” about his service. heise online has apparently also been affected by such a block for several days. The site is no longer accessible from the company network, and emails to the operator cannot be delivered. The cause of the block for heise online is apparently a report from November 2025, which concerned investigations by US authorities against Archive.today.

This report also mentioned and linked Janni Patokallio's blog post. In it, he explains, among other things, that Archive.today operates a botnet with changing IP addresses to circumvent anti-scraping measures. Archive.today allows previous versions of a website to be accessed, but in many cases, it also bypasses paywalls of publications. Patokallio also wrote that the operator(s) are based in Russia – a thesis that is, however, controversial online.

How the affected party reacts
Janni Patokallio explained in his blog that the DDoS attack does not cost him financially, as he uses web hosting at a flat rate. In addition, ad blockers like uBlock Origin now block the DDoS requests. The attack was apparently preceded by an email from the Archive.today operator, which he initially overlooked. When he finally replied, the operator threatened him with defamatory measures.

With his action, the operator of Archive.today may also be getting users from Germany into legal trouble. DDoS attacks are punishable by law. “If one is now unwittingly involved in such an attack, it cannot be criminally relevant due to a lack of intent; however, if one recognizes both the attack and one's own contribution in the form of calling up the form and knowingly accepts that this is realized as a supporting component, then a criminal offense would exist,” IT lawyer Jens Ferner assessed the legal situation when asked by heise online. While in practice criminal prosecution is unlikely due to the effort involved. However, the media reports making the attack public are likely to make intent easier to prove.

Ferner points to another side effect: By having Archive.today unknowingly let users access the Finnish blogger's URL, their IP addresses are transmitted to him. This could be a point of attack for prosecuting copyright infringements.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Kiwi Farms set up an on-premise mirror of all archive.xx links from their forum (the volume is comparable).

Is that a thing?

 

[Jemn Oopi]

Is that a thing?

Maybe he's referring to this abortive attempt from a few months ago.

Lots of archives are off-site. archive.ph/is and ghostarchive are two of the biggest archival tools, but i've been wondering: what happens if/when those get taken down? Do the teams behind them have the funding and willpower to handle a massive deplatforming campaign? Maybe they do, but i'm not sure.
In general i'm surprised that the farms puts such faith in these off-site archives. Obviously if they are all we have we have to make do, but I don't think its ideal.

Is there any possibility of local kiwi website archives? There's, as far as i know, pretty good FOSS website archival tools. Are there roadblocks that i'm not seeing when it comes to archiving websites locally on the kiwi farms network? If it takes lots of resources to archive sites, perhaps restrict it to reputable users so that it doesn't get abused?

yeah, it's on my to do list. he used to have .zip archives but got rid of them.

Even with what Josh said, the site is still heavily vulnerable to having >95% of it's archives being wiped out if archive.is were to go down for whatever reason, and anything to alleviate this problem is a good thing.

Idk I've tried to get him to allow me to download copies of the archives but he doesn't seem amenable. I've discussed this before but I have neither the tools nor means to accomplish this at the moment.

I can get a list of every single archive.x archive id but if I'm to bother you need to tell me how you're going to get the data and create a backup. there's some python-based self-hosted stuff I've looked at before but they don't have the means to import >300,000 links.

you can try to download the archives as a WARC (ideally just the interior of the page) but like I said I have no tools for this.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

This is my idea for creating a lightweight archive service that only stores URLs, hashes, timestamps, etc., and puts the onus on the user to store an MHTML archive that can have its authenticity verified by the service:

Post in thread 'Hacker News'

Feb 2, 2026

I can't wait to need four archives like this just to protect myself against future dumbfuckery.

It's been discussed before, and an archive is one aspect of Kiwi Farms which Null can't replace. Absolutely no one would trust it for evidence. The entire reason a random archive can be trusted for some petty bullshit is exactly because it's incredibly unlikely for the owner of an archive to ruin his credibility over a tweet or some shit.

In the past year it became evident to me that we have to oh baby quadruple archive for very important stuff. All of them have various problems, and...

• The Mass Shooter Ron Soye

Reactions: x 2 x 3 x 5

 

[Null]

abortive attempt

I have 1.6tb of archive.today copies. I've not fully verified them all but I sent him a list of something like >250,000 archive.[a-z] links and he uploaded 1.6tb of something.

 

[Ted's Cabin]

I wish such an important resource was in less crazy hands.

You want someone to dedicate their life to something no one else will do and will make tons of enemies for peanuts, and you don't want them to be crazy? This type of job requires an absolute psycho. But enough about kiwifarms

 

[Ruben Sim]

"Nora"
man i can't imagine why this guy hates us

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

"Nora"
man i can't imagine why this guy hates us

AFAIK the Archive.today guy (who likes us) used a "Nora" alias (possibly a stolen identity?) to complain about a blogger attempting to dox him.

 

[JoshPlz]

Fuck journoscum, but I don't see how the possible consequences for him and his site are worth it. He's obviously trying to send a message, since he could just buy anonymous DDoS attacks for pennies. Still doesn't make sense.

 

[Van Argiano]

Archive.today isn't dead just yet. I probably archived 150 things with it today.

We will always need more of these services though. And no, Null will not host one.

Looks like he only did it to the one blog. It's a massive credibility problem, but practically speaking, 99.9999999% of its contents are as useful as they ever were.

It might be worth re-archiving what can be re-archived on another platform before scumfucks start pointing to this situation as "proof" that evidence against them "comes from a platform known to tamper with archives".

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

It might be worth re-archiving what can be re-archived on another platform before scumfucks start pointing to this situation as "proof" that evidence against them "comes from a platform known to tamper with archives".

Yeah, it could be inevitable. We'll see if the court of public opinion lets them get away with that. I'm generally more worried about these services dying permanently.

I try to double archive for things of medium importance, and go for triple/quadruple for anything really hot.

 

[Desumorphine]

If the tampering of snapshots turns out to be true, I don't even care about any of the other stuff. If Wikipedia discovered that sort of shit, they can't keep using Archive as a service, period.

 

[Rozzy]

German users who use Archive.today are thus operating in a legal gray area and could be committing a criminal offense, says a specialist lawyer for IT law.

I often have German exit nodes, so I guess they get put on a blacklist.

 

[Harvey Danger]

If the tampering of snapshots turns out to be true, I don't even care about any of the other stuff. If Wikipedia discovered that sort of shit, they can't keep using Archive as a service, period.

It was literally the ONE THING he could do to really discredit himself. And he did it.

You want someone to dedicate their life to something no one else will do and will make tons of enemies for peanuts, and you don't want them to be crazy? This type of job requires an absolute psycho. But enough about kiwifarms

There's a common thread with these niche pursuits. Null established standards for the site and kept them. KF only hangs together and has a hardcore audience as long as that's true. Archive guy just violated the minimal standard that earned him loyalty.

 

[AnOminous]

You want someone to dedicate their life to something no one else will do and will make tons of enemies for peanuts, and you don't want them to be crazy? This type of job requires an absolute psycho. But enough about kiwifarms

This is why we need nutjobs. Nobody but nutjobs would do this shit for free.

 

[deleuzeon]

Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable

Uh, sir, you are Wikipedia.

 

[3MMA]

Archive.today isn't dead just yet

True. This seems to be partially a reaction to archive today’s recent actions, but it’s also clearly a manufactured hit job from organized opposition on the guy & his archive. They made it personal by poking with a stick (document drop attempts) & then go cry when he (albeit bigly & wildly) defends himself. His ‘chives still work. One edited image doesn’t immediately fuck his work up totally, especially if he doesn’t make that a habit. At least without keeping public logs of any & all edits. (In fact, that action could potentially help him still on this.) If he explains the what & why, (beyond the blogs alone, maybe a temp page on his site or whatever works to bring eyes) so the smear job articles aren’t the only voices, in a way that aids his good archival work & is more importantly, visible.

It’s one lie (so to speak) that image edit, versus Wikipedia’s one-million lies, & also in addition to the Internet Archives infamous pay to play lies, where they erase entire archives on demand for top dollar. Who benefits here? Wikipaedo’s & the rest of the controlled “team” such as the techie assholes who play at being just like the Moral Majority of yesteryear, telling everyone what to do & think, & finally also the bad parts of Internet Archive, who follow orders rather than actual archival standards, despite lies to the contrary by their buddies who are currently so quick with the hot goss on all this, right now. They all act like hypocrites here, as if they are the pure sun and the archive today guy is pure evil for this admittedly rough stretch while under attack. It’s a bit surprising to see anyone who knows anything, immediately buy such propaganda, whatever variety it’s being given as.

If the tampering of snapshots turns out to be true, I don't even care about any of the other stuff. If Wikipedia discovered that sort of shit, they can't keep using Archive as a service, period.

What about Wikipedia? That’s the question. I understand exactly what you mean, but this is a more complicated & nuanced one off, rather than a matter of course. Who controls what people see? Thinking of all the articles (& journo write ups) either being written on any wiki & in relation to various online archives in this matter, let alone certain web forums. Look at what Wikipedia says about Kiwi Farms. Rhetorical questions (as I’m sure you’re aware,) point being, critical thinking saves the day & many of these voices against archive today have fucked up themselves in various ways, some even similar to what archive today guy did, or much worse. Extreme bias too often runs the show in many alleged, vaunted, online “institutions,” and it’s a good idea to think twice on such loaded things. Who benefits? Is this real or accurate? What’s not being said? Is any of it being framed out of proportion? Etc, & the list goes on.

 

[lowkeyl0ki]

It might be worth re-archiving what can be re-archived on another platform before scumfucks start pointing to this situation as "proof" that evidence against them "comes from a platform known to tamper with archives".

no lie i keep seeing these archival websites go through shit and i want to contribute by making my own that will (hopefully) have no issues, either for general use or explicitly catered to kiwifarms.

then i slap myself and say i need to save money and go back to working

 

[Realistic]

Internet Archive blocking Kiwi Farms, archive.today modifying snapshots; I've come to the conclusion there's no archive site with integrity.

There should be an archive site where the snapshots can't be tampered with, no matter how hard anybody tries.

 

[Kokonut Kangs Klan]

There should be an archive site where the snapshots can't be tampered with, no matter how hard anybody tries.

Since most sites are HTTPS now, all they need to do is archive the full TLS exchange (and any related per-connection keys) to be verified by readers with existing CAs. This doesn't verify the time of archival, might require custom tools, and might leak more headers/etc than the archiver wants, but the core problem has solved itself: Until client session keys/etc are hidden inside DRM/TPM cuckboxes, verifiable replays between cooperative clients will always be possible.

 

[lowkeyl0ki]

no lie i keep seeing these archival websites go through shit and i want to contribute by making my own that will (hopefully) have no issues, either for general use or explicitly catered to kiwifarms.

then i slap myself and say i need to save money and go back to working

i mean shit i'd do it i just need a good platform that gives zero fucks about free speech, as long as it's something that's legitimately not against the law.

signed up to 1984 Hosting a while back, wonder if it'll be any good.