Internet Archive Hacked, Exposing Data For Over 31 Million Users

The Internet Archive was hacked and has reportedly exposed 31 million user accounts.

Founder Brewster Kahle posted on X, “Services are currently stopped to upgrade internal systems.”

“We are working to restore services as quickly and safely as possible. Sorry for this disruption,” added Kahle.

Kahle further explained that the digital archive was taken down after a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack.

The most notable feature of the Internet Archive is its Wayback Machine, which saves snapshots of webpages at different points in time.

JUST IN – Internet Archive hacked. A popup claims there was a "catastrophic security breach" and now the site is down with a "temporarily offline" notice — The Verge pic.twitter.com/RufvctlB8X

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) October 9, 2024

I cannot understate how bad it would be if the Internet archive goes away. I have so many links from it bookmarked going back 15 years on everything from vaccines, fluoride, geoengineering, and so many other important topics.

If it dies, we're losing so much history and… https://t.co/KM08vPMxtD

— Inversionism (@Inversionism) October 12, 2024

Per The Hill:

The Internet Archive, a popular digital library known for its Wayback Machine, was hacked and suffered a data breach that reportedly exposed 31 million user accounts.
Founder Brewster Kahle confirmed in a post on the social media platform X that a cyberattack on Tuesday knocked the website offline. He also said that usernames, emails, and encrypted passwords had been compromised.

“Services are currently stopped to upgrade internal systems,” Kahle wrote in a Thursday update. “We are working to restore services as quickly and safely as possible. Sorry for this disruption.”

He explained that hackers launched a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack against the library. This type of attack floods a website with excessive traffic, causing it to crash or become inaccessible, according to the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency.

Digital history is being rewritten and you didn’t even know about it.

Did you know that someone hacked into the INTERNET ARCHIVE and took them offline? Someone is trying to erase our digital history.

Do you have your own historical archive? What about hard cover books? If you… pic.twitter.com/UgSU5nJ8CL

— Frankly Frank (@CastiglioneFrnk) October 12, 2024

Here’s what The Verge reported:

When visiting the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) on Wednesday afternoon, The Verge was greeted with a pop-up claiming the site had been hacked. Just after 9PM ET, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle confirmed the breach and said the website had been defaced with the notification via a JavaScript library.

Here’s what the pop-up said:

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!

HIBP refers to Have I Been Pwned, a website where people can look up whether their information has been published in data leaked from cyberattacks. HIBP operator Troy Hunt confirmed to BleepingComputer that he received a file containing “email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data” for 31 million unique email addresses nine days ago and confirmed it was valid by matching data with a user’s account.

A tweet from HIBP said 54 percent of the accounts were already in its database from previous breaches. In posts on his account, Hunt gave further details on the timeline, including contacting the Internet Archive about the breach on October 6th and moving forward with the disclosure process, to today, when the site was defaced and DDoS’d at the same time they were loading the data into HIBP to begin notifying affected users.

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