Visiting The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) on Wednesday afternoon, The edge was greeted by a pop-up window saying the site had been hacked. After closing the message, the site loaded normally, albeit slowly.
However, at 5:30 p.m. ET, the pop-up disappeared, as did the rest of the site, leaving only a placeholder message saying “Internet Archive services are temporarily offline” and directing visitors to the site page. x.com/internetarchive/”>count in x for updates.
This is what the pop-up window said:
“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive is powered by devices and constantly on the verge of a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. I see 31 million of you on HIBP!
HIBP refers to Have I been fooled?a website where people can check whether or not their information has been published in data leaked by cyberattacks. It's unclear what's happening with the site, but attacks on services like TweetDeck have exploited XSS or cross-site scripting vulnerabilities to similar effects.
Jason Scott, archivist and software curator at The Internet Archive, said the site was experiencing a DDoS attack. posting on Mastodon that “According to their twitter, they do it just to do it. Just because they can. “No declaration, no idea, no demand.”
An account on x called SN_Blackmeta said it was behind the attack and hinted that another attack was planned for tomorrow. The account also posted about DDoSing the Archive in May, and Scott previously posted about attacks apparently aimed at disrupting the Internet Archive.
We have contacted the organization for more information.
Update, October 9: Noticed that the site has been replaced by a placeholder.
