Following a significant DDoS attack on October 9th, the Internet Archive, the world’s largest online repository, has partially reopened its virtual doors, albeit in a restricted, read-only mode.
This significant cybersecurity incident led to the theft of a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records.
Founder Brewster Kahle confirmed that the Internet Archive is “safe to resume” but cautioned that additional maintenance could cause temporary suspensions as the platform recovers from the incident.
While services like the Wayback Machine, which allows users to search billions of archived web pages, are now accessible, adding new pages to the archive remains unavailable. This read-only mode restricts users from preserving current web pages as part of the archive, a key function that has yet to be restored.
As per Have I Been Pwned, a repository of breached data, the Internet Archive dataset included email addresses and user names of registered Internet Archive users, along with other sensitive information such as password change timestamps and Bcrypt-hashed passwords.
Hacktivist group BlackMeta claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack but did not acknowledge involvement in the data breach.
In the days following the breach, the Internet Archive staff has been steadily restoring key services, including staff email accounts and crawlers used by National Libraries.
In an October 10 tweet, Kahle explained that the attack had been fended off and the organisation had disabled the JS library and upgraded the security. In subsequent tweets, Kahle assured us that the data had not been corrupted and that the Internet Archive staff was working on restoring the full website.
The partial restoration comes at a critical time for the digital library. Google recently integrated links to the Wayback Machine into its search results, offering users access to older versions of websites. This move followed Google’s decision to remove its cached page links earlier this year, making the Wayback Machine an essential tool for users seeking archived content.
This isn’t the first time a DDoS attack has targeted the Internet Archive. In May 2024, the repository was targeted by a prolonged DDoS attack that disrupted the service for many days.
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