Hacked and Hijacked: The Archive’s Darkest Hour
Posted: Tue Oct 15, 2024 9:23 am
Hello everyone,
Let’s talk about something that’s been quietly keeping the history of the internet alive—The Internet Archive. For those who aren’t familiar, this digital library is where the web’s forgotten pages, old books, movies, and even outdated software live on. Its crown jewel, the Wayback Machine, lets you travel back in time to see how websites looked years ago, saving everything from personal blogs to big corporate pages that would have otherwise been lost to the abyss.
But now, the unthinkable has happened...
On October 9th, our beloved Internet Archive was hit by a devastating cyberattack. Like someone ripping pages from a book in the middle of the night, a DDoS attack and a brutal data breach brought the entire archive to its knees. The library that kept our digital memories safe was suddenly offline, left wounded and vulnerable. And as if that wasn’t enough, the attackers walked away with 31 million unique user records—email addresses, hashed passwords, screen names—you name it, they took it.
The worst part? The Archive is back online now, but only in a “read-only” state. It’s like being allowed into a museum after hours, but all the lights are off, and you can’t touch anything. You can still search the 916 billion web pages they’ve archived over the years, but if you were hoping to save a new page, add to the legacy, or capture the internet as it is today—sorry, not happening. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Archive, gave us a somber update: “Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.” A delicate balance, teetering on the edge of another shutdown.
The team at the Archive is working around the clock to restore services, but it’s a slow, painful process. Bit by bit, they’re bringing back email accounts, crawling services for national libraries, and slowly piecing together the damage. It’s a fight to protect the internet’s history, but with so much stolen and broken, it feels like the Archive is now standing on shaky ground.
And just when things were looking up—Google had *finally* started linking to archived websites in the Wayback Machine after removing their own cached page links—this attack knocked everything back down again. Now, we can only wait, hoping that the Archive will rise from the ashes, more secure and resilient than before.
So, yeah—this isn’t just about a website going down. It’s about the internet’s memory, the fragile history that the Archive protects, and how easily that can be compromised. We’re back online, for now, but who knows what the future holds? Let’s hope this isn’t the end of the story.
