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Cyberattack on The World’s Largest Internet Archive – WaPo

The Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine were offline for several days, when its vast catalogue of webpages and archives were inaccessible; it later restored a read-only version of Wayback.


Cyber security has been a greater priority for many countries in recent years given the jump in cyber attacks and ransomware efforts by rogue groups such as Lockbit and countries such as North Korea (Reuters image).

 

Hackers have struck the Internet Archive, leaking details of its 31 million users and leaving a message that taunted the non-profit website “for running on a shoestring budget,” according to a report by the Washington Post, which added that the team running the 28-year-old site had to take it and its popular Wayback Machine offline.

Most of the site remains offline as founder Brewster Kahle and his team assess implications of the attack on the archival repository of digital history, which preserves 900-billion webpages on the Wayback Machine, it said, noting that the site was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in May, which was the first time it had ever been targeted.

Kahle and his team spent a week trying to find and fix vulnerabilities that left the Archive open to attack, but its preserved data was, curiously, not compromised or facing a ransom demand, after hackers alerted them to the intrusion. A hacking group on X (formally Twitter) claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks in May, it said.

Read the full report: The Washington Post.

 

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Jim Pollard

Jim Pollard is an Australian journalist based in Thailand since 1999. He worked for News Ltd papers in Sydney, Perth, London and Melbourne before travelling through SE Asia in the late 90s. He was a senior editor at The Nation for 17+ years.