Hackers are mounting an attack on the Internet Archive

Taking a look at your long-ago favorite Geocities page has been a bit challenging of late and now the Internet Archive is explaining why. The nonprofit’s Wayback Machine, which stores old versions of Webpages and other cultural artifacts, has been the target of an ongoing distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for more than three days.

The attacks began Sunday, the company has announced in a blog post, with tens of thousands of fake information requests per second. As of Wednesday, the source of the attack was still unknown. That has resulted in limited access to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and other services.

“Thankfully the collections are safe, but we are sorry that the denial-of-service attack has knocked us offline intermittently during these last three days,” wrote Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, in a statement. “With the support from others and the hard work of staff, we are hardening our defenses to provide more reliable access to our library. What is new is this attack has been sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean.”

The attack was ongoing as of 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, according to a Tweet from the organization.

In the last six months of 2023, there were more than 7 million DDoS attacks, and a growing number of those have been politically motivated, according to analysis from the cybersecurity provider Netscout. The back half of last year saw a 15% rise in DDoS attacks, which make a website inaccessible by flooding it with requests for information, overwhelming its servers. The attacks often come from infected computers, without the owner realizing it. One particular attacker targeted 780 websites across 35 countries last year.

While there’s no indication politics has anything to do with this series of attacks, the Internet Archive did note that there have been an increasing number of cyber attacks on libraries of late. The British Library, the Solano County (California) Public Library, the Berlin Natural History Museum, and Ontario’s London Public Library have all been recent victims.

In the case of the British Library, ransomware hackers were able to keep the Website and digital catalog largely offline from late October of last year through Jan. 15, 2024.

The Internet Archive is also facing legal action from both the book publishing and music industries, it said. Those copyright infringement cases, filed in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic for scanning and lending digital copies of copyrighted books and digitizing music from vintage records, could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, which would severely impact the site’s operations.

“If our patrons around the globe think this latest situation is upsetting, then they should be very worried about what the publishing and recording industries have in mind,” wrote Kahle. “I think they are trying to destroy this library entirely and hobble all libraries everywhere. But just as we’re resisting the DDoS attack, we appreciate all the support in pushing back on this unjust litigation against our library and others.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, parts of the Wayback Machine were functioning, though finding an archived version of archived sites was a hit or miss affair, with some days archived material available, while others were not. 

https://www.fastcompany.com/91132773/hackers-ddos-attack-on-internet-archive-wayback-machine?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss