The Internet Archive is recovering from a series of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks that disrupted its operations in October. The organisation, best known for its Wayback Machine — an essential tool that archives web pages for public access — has been gradually restoring its services including the ‘Save Page Now’ tool after weeks of downtime and limited functionality.
As of yesterday, the Archive’s ‘Save Page Now’ feature is back online, which allows users to save snapshots of individual web pages. This service allows users to proactively archive web content for future reference, helping to preserve information that might otherwise be lost or altered over time.
The DDoS attacks began on October 9-10, causing severe disruptions and temporarily causing the Archive to take down its site. By October 14, the Wayback Machine had returned in a limited, read-only capacity.
However, the Archive once again suffered a cyber breach. This time, the attackers targeted the organisation’s Zendesk email support platform, exfiltrating more than 7 TB of data.
Just a month before the attacks, the Archive entered into a deal with Google, allowing the search engine to enable users to access historical versions of webpages directly from search results.
While users could access previously archived web pages, they couldn’t add new content to the Archive. This restriction, a measure to protect the integrity of the Archive’s systems, remained in place until recently when the ‘Save Page Now’ function resumed.
Along with announcing the restoration of ‘Save Page Now,’ the Internet Archive has assured users that it will continue collecting and preserving new web pages from October 9 onward. This announcement reassures the digital preservation community that the Wayback Machine’s historical record will remain as continuous and comprehensive as possible despite the disruption.
In addition to the DDoS attacks, the Internet Archive also disclosed a significant data breach affecting over 31 million records. According to security researchers, the two incidents—DDoS attacks and data breach—were entirely coincidental and carried out by two separate entities.
While BlackMeta, a Russian threat actor, claimed responsibility of for the DDoS attack but did not acknowledge involvement in the data breach.
This isn’t the first DDoS attack on the Internet Archive in 2024. Back in May, a DD0S attack disrupted the service for many days. However, there was no data breach at that time.
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