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Internet Archive’s the ‘Way Back Machine’ suffers a significant data breach
The Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, confirmed the breach and said the website had been defaced with a pop-up through a JavaScript library. The site was also hit with a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that have taken archive.org and openlibrary.org offline. As of Tuesday, both sites remained offline. Internet Archive is being “cautious and prioritizing keeping data safe at the expense of service availability,” Kahle said in an update on X.
Even though the hacking and the DDoS attacks coincided, they appear to be unrelated. It isn’t entirely clear who was behind the attacks, but the BlackMeta hacktivist group claimed responsibility on X for the DDoS attacks and said it plans to carry out more against the Internet Archive. The group claimed to target the archive because it “belongs to the USA,” whose “horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of ‘Israel.’ ” Its involvement has not been confirmed.
The Wayback Machine is a digital arcyhive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows users to go “back in time” to see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide “universal access to all knowledge” by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.
Launched on May 10, 1996, the Wayback Machine had saved more than 38.2 billion web pages at the end of 2009. As of January 3, 2024, the Wayback Machine has archived more than 860 billion web pages and well over 99 petabytes of data