The Internet Archive is under attack, with a popup claiming a ‘catastrophic’ breach - A popup message claims the online archive has suffered “a catastrophic security breach,” as its operators say the site has been DDOS’d for days.

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When visiting The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) on Wednesday afternoon, The Verge was greeted by a pop-up claiming the site had been hacked. After closing the message, the site loaded normally, albeit slowly.

However, as of 5:30PM ET, the popup was gone, but so was the rest of the site, leaving only a placeholder message saying “Internet Archive services are temporarily offline” and directing visitors to the site’s account on X for updates.

Here’s what the popup 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!”
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HIBP refers to Have I Been Pwned?, a website where people can look up whether or not their information has been published in data leaked from cyber attacks. It’s unclear what is happening with the site, but attacks on services like TweetDeck have exploited XSS or cross-site scripting vulnerabilities with similar effects.

Jason Scott, an archivist and software curator of The Internet Archive, said the site was experiencing a DDoS attack, posting on Mastodon that “According to their twitter, they’re doing it just to do it. Just because they can. No statement, no idea, no demands.”

An account on X called SN_Blackmeta said it was behind the attack and implied that another attack was planned for tomorrow. The account also posted about DDoSing the Archive in May, and Scott has previously posted about attacks seemingly aimed at disrupting the Internet Archive.

We’ve reached out to the organization to learn more information.

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Link to discussion regarding the breach on Hacker News
 
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Slav Power said:
They also aren't as politically motivated as most believe they are. They had absolutely zero issues hosting Johnny Rebel songs, Moonman covers, RAC discographies or even full MATI episodes that people uploaded there. Their administration doesn't go around playing whack-a-mole with anything they disagree with politically, kiwifarms.net getting excluded from the Wayback Machine was simply the result of the complaint volume during the peak of #DropKiwiFarms campaign.
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That's more of a case of benign neglect than anything, though given what's currently going on it's not so benign.

I agree with the general sentiment of your post that the internet archive has been a net good, but if they weren't so lazy they'd 100% go on a wrongthink purge. Hell now that they have to get off their ass and actually do something I wouldn't be surprised if they do
 
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This gay little DDoS has now made me fully support Hamas guys, their larpy faggot activism is working, said no one ever.
I still need to fetch a few files for work. Fuck these retards. Go hack/DDoS the Israeli government, what a lot of pussies.

Yes, IA isn't perfect. They pander to troons and it wouldn't surprise me if their upper guys are all rabid leftoids. That's not something I can force myself to care about. I often need to fetch old documents for work and they're the only source that holds it. I've found things from the 90s archived there that helped me.
 
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This attack doesn't make any sense, the sand monkeys think that the U.S. owns Internet archive when its a non profited origination belonging to no government.
There is something they don't want archiving and covering up in my opinion

Also SoG made a video about the situation

 
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Candlelight Desolation said:
On a long enough timeline, every site you use will have a breach like this eventually.
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With the latest data breaches and recent news of so many peoples' personal data being on the dark web now, the (unfortunate) question to ask now is "Who and what hasn't been breached yet?" because the answer is probably simpler than enumerating who has at this point.

Still, one wonders what kind of regular security audits IA had in place. One can't prevent 100% of the exploits/breaches, but they can be minimized with vigilant security. TFW Dear Leader appears more gung-ho about data security and "digital hygiene" as @Path Wanderer put it versus every other big company out there.

HahaYes said:
So they've likely known the data was pinched at least 3 days ago and said shit all. Hell of a PR strategy huh
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Years ago, an online store that was a preferred vendor for stuff I bought had a data breach within 48 hours after I placed what would be my final order from them. They never did tell any of their customers about the breach and ran afoul of at least one state's laws requiring victims in their state to be notified timely. I only found out about the breach indirectly when my credit card company contacted me to ask if I just bought home improvement materials from a store over 1000 miles away.

I get that companies don't want to admit they've been compromised because of the reputation and PR hit. However, hiding it both makes matters worse and it gives their clients, customers, etc. no reason to trust them moving forward.
 
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Space Police said:
Is it bad that I just don't care about this and am kind of secretly happy about it? Internet Archive is a dishonest, tranny-enabling organization that is willing to censor history to promote their own narratives and archives porn sites, so if the Internet Archive going kaput lessens the harm those things causes, I'm all for it.
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>Average soyjak avatar poster doesnt understand why destroying the modern Library of Alexandria because they don't agree 100% with him politically is a bad move
 
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Seen a lot of Twitterfags rush to any news of the attack and the motives behind it just to cry out "I-ITS A PSYOP J-JUST TO MAKE PRO-PALESTINIANS L-LOOK BAD" as they hold back their tears. As if they're completely unaware of the large retarded monster they've created by years of virtue signaling and keyboard activism.

Internet politifags ruin everything and are actual cancer.
 
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I like having access to free shit and info like books, old webpages and software.

Anyone who gives me access to it, even if they are not perfect, is good. Anyone who tries to take away access to that information is bad. Sometimes someone who is good can do a bad thing that doesn't outweigh their net goodness. This is how I view the Internet Archive. Sometimes they do bad things like cuck to tranny pressure, but the net amount of good they do far outweighs any of that.
 
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