Internet Archive back online. What happened?

The Internet Archive is back online in read-only mode after a cyber attack knocked out the digital library and Wayback Machine last week. On 9 October, a data breach and DDoS attack took the site offline, which contains 31 million unique records that were also stolen in recent weeks. The Internet Archive is now back online in a 'safe, read-only mode'.

According to The Verge, anyone visiting the site in the hours after the attack was confronted with a cryptic pop-up announcing the breach, with a sarcastic message: 'Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive was running on outdated systems and was constantly at risk of a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See you 31 million on HIBP."

The acronym HIBP refers to Have I Been Pwned?, a service that allows users to check whether their data has been compromised as a result of security breaches. Unfortunately, in this case, Troy Hunt's platform did not just monitor: Hunt himself confirmed to BleepingComputer that data from the Internet Archive ended up online. The file in question, called 'ia_users.sql', was leaked by a hacker some nine days before the actual attack. With its 6.4 GB of data, the file contained email addresses, user names, passwords hashed with Bcrypt (one of the most secure, but not invulnerable encryption systems) and other internal data of registered members.

Jason Scott, noted archivist and software curator at The Internet Archive, confirmed that in addition to the data breach, the site was targeted by a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which temporarily took the entire system offline. However, what is surprising is the absence of ransom demands or other claims by the attackers, which is rather unusual in attacks of this magnitude. No clear motive has emerged so far, which leaves room for speculation: it could be a show of force by the hackers, a message or even an attempt to destabilise one of the world's largest online storage resources.

The case of the Internet Archive is significant, as it hosts a huge amount of information, books, websites, images and documents, representing an irreplaceable resource for digital memory preservation. However, before the Internet Archive, there are numerous cases of data breaches to open-source and online archiving platforms. There is the case of GitHub in 2018, hit by a massive DDoS attack, and that of Drupal, one of the most widely used open-source CMSs in the world. The data breach is not only an immediate concern for the millions of users affected, but raises broader questions about the security of non-profit platforms. These organisations often do not have the same resources to defend themselves as large technology companies, once again highlighting their difficulties in protecting their systems from web threats.