Starting at 5pm on October 9th, Internet Archive users began reporting a popup message when trying to load the website, as well as an ongoing DDoS attack. The message foreshadows the data of 31 million users being leaked, and telling people to check haveibeenpwned.

(image from twitter)

This comes after IA founder Brewser Kahle mentioned a DDoS attack on the 7th and 8th.


As of writing this archive.org's services do not appear to work, though the message still appears. There has been no official response yet. When any news comes out this news thread will be updated.

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Update: The Internet Archive has been taken offline as of 5:30pm

Twitter account Sn_darkmeta is claiming responsibility for the outage (as well as past outages), citing that they started the attach because of the American government's association with Israel.

They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of “Israel”.

IA has been actively working on preserving Palestinian history, as IA's Jason Scott outlined in his twitter thread. This attack is completely contradictory to the attacker's values and makes no sense (assuming Sn_darkmeta is actually involved).

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At 5:50pm Brewster Kahle made a twitter post acknowledging the DDoS attack, however there was no comment on the security breach.

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This has now been confirmed to be a breach. Thank you @SylverReZ for dropping the article link.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...-hacked-data-breach-impacts-31-million-users/

 

[lordelan]

Why would any sick f*cker hack the glorious IA? Let 'em burn in hell!

 

[Egoistamamono]

What a shame, for the sake of hypocritical politics being carried out to affect a useful site..last night I was still able to open IA until 12 pm (GMT+7)

 

[Smoker1]

Got a better idea: How about going after the Wealthy?????

 

[Faust03]

Got a better idea: How about going after the Wealthy?????

Go for government sites or some shit, leave this one alone because I need it

 

[The Catboy]

The logic for this attack is stupid as fuck. "They are in the US and we are mad at the US." Why not go after government sites? Why be so cowardly as to go after IA?

 

[Lostbhoy]

I think Nintendo hired them.

Crazy days people.

 

[SylverReZ]

I think Nintendo hired them.

Crazy days people.

With jokes aside, it's a politically motivated attack, it has nothing to do with Nintendo.

 

[Deleted member 702243]

it's really easy to turn the public against activists you dont like. just do something shameful and then pretend it was done in the name of [cause I disagree with], everyone will believe it and get upset against the cause. works every time

 

[rvtr]

I love community notes.

 

[Deleted member 486901]

Well, guess it's a good thing I downloaded that ICO screensaver last night instead of waiting 'till morning time.

 

[Dark_Ansem]

Dumbasses Black Meta

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Governments are evil, we get it. What does that have to do with Internet Archive? They're the good guys.

 

[PrincessLillie]

Well this stinks.

I guess I'll have to reset my password when the Archive comes back online. I'm a pretty active contributor.
Of all USA-based sites to breach, I can only wonder why they chose the Archive. As if they weren't troubled already with their legal cases.

 

[supergamer368]

This is like saying you hate the president and bombing Walmarts because of it. Absolutely no connection, the person(s) who did this attack are fucking braindead. The Archive is arguably one of the most important websites in existence, especially now as more websites disappear and search results get clogged with AI generated trash. It's really getting on my nerves how often they're being targetted for bullshit reasons, but I hope they can stay afloat for years to come.

...and yeah, please change your password if you have an account, I just changed mine.

 

[Robert Newbie]

Such strange timing, I don't browse the site often, but I happened to be when the attack hit. I remember thinking it was loading particularly fast, then nothing.

 

[leejaclane]

Interesting to me how so many people accept at face value what someone claiming to be the attackers says was their motive without wondering even for a second if they could be lying.

The "we did it because government" explanation doesn't even mesh with what they actually did or what the message on the site was, the message on the site clearly demonstrated the understanding that IA is not owned by the government or a government entity. Furthermore, politically motivated attacks like this supposedly was are not done on a whim, regardless of your politics or intelligence level you would do research into potential targets before landing on IA and you would immediately realize that IA is not related to the US government at all and that it serves the whole world.

There's not a chance in hell that this was motivated by the US government's participation in genocide, and yet almost everyone here seems to believe that nonsense immediately and without question.

 

[Lumstar]

Much of the core infrastructure of the internet is located in the US. Most root nameservers, and prominent web standards organizations (ICANN, etc).

 

[Japermen]

What kind of loser hacks the internet archive?

 

[genxor]

Buncha idiots out for attention. There's no way anyone would be stupid enough to believe the IA is run by the government when you can google, or maybe even just visit the site. Then again people are going to buy alarmo...

They just went for an easier target. If it was for purposes of harming the government or supporters of Israel they'd have hacked a bank or some government agency but they don't have the skills, so let's just hack a big site for attention and claim it's political. Are they still called script kiddies?

 

[CoolMe]

Didn't expect this at all, i thought this is somehow connected to the brutal multiple copyright infringement lawsuits IA's been dealing with lately, but nope. I hope users' data stays intact and not wiped by these douchbags