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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supersock12345 said:
Timestamp 38:03 -
He begins talking about "adding context" and working with "fact checking organizations" and "implementing them in unique ways to the Internet Archive"

Timestamp 52:08 -
Talks about partnership with Jewgle and how Trump is a bad fascist who spread mis/dis/mal-information and how the Internet Archive is working to stop that spread of dangerous foul disgusting information!
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Both of these time stamps are huge contradictions. The Internet Archive is supposed to be a huge example of preserving and protecting free speech, not a “fact checker” that works for the same establishment that would suppress and censor free speech to advance agendas that would make them obsolete.

It almost sounds like they didn’t learn anything from the long downtime that they suffered from.
 
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Jonah Hill poster said:
It almost sounds like they didn’t learn anything from the long downtime that they suffered from.
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It wouldn't surprise me if they are somehow behind the downtime and using it to implement unwanted changes. Less friction from the users compared to pushing all sorts of updates when the site was running relatively smoothly. I'm naturally prone to conspiratorial thinking, but something about this whole thing seems very off.
 
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clipartfan92 said:
It wouldn't surprise me if they are somehow behind the downtime and using it to implement unwanted changes. Less friction from the users compared to pushing all sorts of updates when the site was running relatively smoothly. I'm naturally prone to conspiratorial thinking, but something about this whole thing seems very off.
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The only thing preventing me from being more conspiratorial is that it would be really retarded to leak their own user data. But then again IA is not ran by brilliant minds.
 
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Jonah Hill poster said:
Both of these time stamps are huge contradictions. The Internet Archive is supposed to be a huge example of preserving and protecting free speech, not a “fact checker” that works for the same establishment that would suppress and censor free speech to advance agendas that would make them obsolete.

It almost sounds like they didn’t learn anything from the long downtime that they suffered from.
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Their mission statement has always been contradictory to their actions. This is nothing new.
 
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Jonah Hill poster said:
Both of these time stamps are huge contradictions. The Internet Archive is supposed to be a huge example of preserving and protecting free speech, not a “fact checker” that works for the same establishment that would suppress and censor free speech to advance agendas that would make them obsolete.

It almost sounds like they didn’t learn anything from the long downtime that they suffered from.
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Exactly. This kind of shit is so freaking stupid and infuriating at the same time. It goes against the very concept in fact!


clipartfan92 said:
It wouldn't surprise me if they are somehow behind the downtime and using it to implement unwanted changes. Less friction from the users compared to pushing all sorts of updates when the site was running relatively smoothly. I'm naturally prone to conspiratorial thinking, but something about this whole thing seems very off.
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Was thinking this instantly myself. The timing of all this.
 
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No idea who Jeff Cliff is, but he's a fucking fool. You mean burn history books like archive.org removing kiwifarms from it's public facing archives? Then the nerve of Jason Scott (((Sadofsky))) to proclaim they didn't lose any data in the hack. They didn't lose any, they just had the user data stolen.
1862289617883373949.png
https://x.com/textfiles/status/1862289617883373949 (archive.ph)
 
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