The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is Under Attack
Alternate Title: The hacker group claims they are not a bunch of teenagers...which means they are a bunch of teenagers...
Summary
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org) is a digital archive that captures and stores snapshots of web pages over time, allowing users to view and access historical versions of websites. Launched in 2001 by the Internet Archive (https://archive.org), it enables anyone to explore archived versions of a site's content, even if the original pages are no longer available or have changed. It's widely used for research, tracking web content history, and preserving digital information.
The Internet Archive has faced aggressive Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks since May, which have worsened recently. Activist group Black Meta is claiming responsibility for the most recent attack.
Breakdown
The Wayback Machine contains over 890 billion archived web pages, nearly 100 petabytes of data.
Google now points to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for cached web pages instead of having a “Cached” button next to search results.
In this latest attack, hackers may have gained some level of control over the Wayback Machine, threatening the integrity of the historical archive of the worldwide web.
Brewster Kahle founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 for universal access to knowledge.
The Internet Archive could be a multi-billion dollar company but remains a free nonprofit service.
Some people want their past online content erased, conflicting with the Archive's mission.
The Internet Archive's role in preserving digital history is irreplaceable by any other entity.
Legal battles and security breaches threaten the sustainability of nonprofit digital archives managed by Internet Archive:
A data breach in September 2024 exposed 31 million email addresses and password hashes from the Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive's Open Library initiative lost a critical legal battle with book publishers over copyright infringement. They now owe book publishers around $600 million in damages. (The Open Library initiative digitizes physical books, allowing one digital copy per owned physical copy. In my opinion, this should be completely legal.)