The huge database of Internet Archivean American non-profit website founded in 1996 which consists of a real digital library containing websites, software applications but also music, films, books with a collection of 42.1 million printed materials, 14 million audio files and 13 millions of videos has undergone a major hacker attack who breached the data of 31 million users who have their own account with important repercussions on their personal data.
The cyber attack
The news about this massive breachhas date on X its founder, Brewster Kahleexplaining that it was an attack DDoSacronym for “Distributed Denial of Service”, when the system is flooded with requests that put the site in question out of action because it is in a certain sense overloaded. The damage is not only for the site which could no longer be consulted but the personal data was exposed to hackers: we are talking about emails, passwords and so on. The attack apparently occurred as early as Tuesday 8 October but the first time dates back to 29 September. The Ddos attack on @internetarchive happened again today. We are working to bring http://archive.org back online”, Kahle wrote.
The hackers’ mockery
In detail, the hackers mocked users with a message written in Javascript (programming language) that appeared as soon as they went to the site. “Have you ever had the feeling that the Internet Archive runs on thumb drives and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. Here are 31 million of you on HIBP!”. But what does the final acronym mean? In practice it is the acronym of the question “Have I been pwned?“, “Have I ever been hacked?” which takes its name from a website available to everyone from which one can find out whether a given account has been hacked or not.
Who is behind the attack
They would have been the hackers of Black Meta to create the damage as they announced on X with a very explanatory video talking about the attack on the Internet Archive. These bad guys had already succeeded in their aim in May, as they had made known on the social network by writing in no uncertain terms that they had removed “all your online services and resources, which include millions of PDF files, movies, saved website history.”
Among the most important functions of this gigantic digital library is the
Wayback Machine, which gives the possibility of preserving web pages as if they were non-modifiable archives: copies of millions of web pages are saved on the Internet Archive but any user can “copy” them and keep them.