Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records.
News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached.
“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!,” reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site.
↫ Lawrence Abrams at Bleeping Computer
To make matters worse, the Internet Archive was also suffering from waves of distributed denial-of-service attacks, forcing the IA to take down the site while strengthening everything up. It seems the attackers have no real motivation, other than the fact they can, but it’s interesting, shall we say, that the Internet Archive has been under legal assault by big publishers for years now, too. I highly doubt the two are related in any way, but it’s an interesting note nonetheless.
I’m still catching up on all the various tech news stories, but this one was hard to miss. A lot of people are rightfully angry and dismayed about this, since attacking the Internet Archive like this kind of feels like throwing Molotov cocktails at a local library – there’s literally not a single reason to do so, and the only people you’re going to hurt are underpaid librarians and chill people who just want to read some books. Whomever is behind this are just assholes, no ifs and buts about it.