The Internet Archive is back online in a read-only state after a cyberattack took down the digital library and Wayback Machine last week. A data breach and DDoS attack took the site offline on October 9, and a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records was also stolen in recent weeks.
Internet Archive is now back online on a “provisional and read-only basis,” according to its founder. x.com/brewster_kahle/status/1845688309085065571?t=Xasn05WBblDStYCPwF0F1w&s=19″>good brewer. “It is safe to resume, but may require further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.”
While you can access the Wayback Machine to search 916 billion web pages that have been archived over time, you currently cannot capture an existing web page in the archive. Kahle and his team have gradually restored Archive.org services in recent days, including the recovery of the team's email accounts and their trackers for the National Libraries. The services have been taken offline so that Internet Archive staff can examine them and harden them against future attacks.
A pop-up from a suspected hacker claimed that the file had suffered a “catastrophic security breach” last week, before Have I Been Pwned confirmed that the data was stolen. The theft included email addresses, usernames, encrypted passwords and other internal data from 31 million unique email accounts.
The Internet Archive outage came just weeks after Google began adding links to websites archived on the Wayback Machine. Google removed its own links to cached pages earlier this year, so having the Wayback Machine linked in Google search results is a useful way to access older versions of websites or archived pages.
