The founder of the Internet Archive website, Brewster Kahle, has confirmed that user data “is safe” and that they are working on reestablishing their service, downed by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, to get it up and running. in the next few days.
Internet Archive It is a non-profit digital library that contains “millions of texts, films, software, music and web pages, which is free to use and has tools such as the Wayback Machine, which allows access to disappeared websites.
A few days ago, users noticed that the website was displaying a pop-up notification indicating that it had suffered a security breach, which Kahle later confirmed. The manager pointed out that the site had suffered a DDoS attack, that is, one in which malicious actors direct a lot of traffic until it saturates and leaves it without service.
Although it indicated that they had “repelled” the attack, which had resulted in the deconfiguration of the Internet Archive through the JavaScript (JS) library or the leaking of emails, usernames and passwords, it did not specify that this would have affected 31 million profilesas the creator of the website Have I Been Pwned?, Troy Hunt, had advanced.
Kahle noted, on the other hand, that they had taken a series of measures as a result of the attack: they disabled the JS library, cleaned the systems and released security updates. At the moment, the Internet Archive service is “temporarily” offline and the Wayback Machine has been temporarily restored to read-only format, as indicated on the website.
The founder of the website has commented more recently that user data “is safe” and that the services it offers they will be offline as they examine them and strengthen their security with the goal of getting them back up and running in “days, not weeks.”
He has also noted that Archive.org subservices “will return to work when they can, safely,” as is the case with email; and around the Wayback Machine, it has warned that “it is safe” to resume its service, but that “it may need more maintenance work.” In that case, it will be suspended again.