The website has suffered a major data breach and an overload attack. Private information from 31 million user accounts was reportedly leaked from the site.
The Internet Archive (Archive.org) is known, among other things, for its Wayback Machine service that preserves old versions of websites. Last week, users visiting the site were greeted by a pop-up message from the hackers, mocking the site’s lack of security.
“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!”
HIBP refers to the Have I Been Pwned website, where you can see if your data has been leaked in various cyber attacks. HIBP operator Troy Hunt confirmed to Bleeping Computer that he received a file containing “email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data” for 31 million unique email addresses nine days ago, and that he confirmed it was valid by matching the data to a user’s account.
In a post on X, HIBP writes that 54% of the accounts were already in its database from previous breaches.
“Doing it because they can”
Jason Scott, archivist and software curator at the Internet Archive, wrote that the site was subjected to a so-called DDoS attack, that is, a denial of service attack, but that “According to their twitter, they’re doing it just to do it. Just because they can. No statement, no idea, no demands“.
The denial of service attack occurred a few days after the data breach, but it is not known at this stage if these are coordinated attacks against the site.
It is unclear who is behind the data breach, but a group calling itself SN_Blackmeta reportedly claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack on X.
