The Internet Archive, one of the web’s largest repositories of information, has been hacked, resulting in a leak of 31 million people’s user data.
archive.org has been compromised in a hack announced by the hacker team in a pop-up that appeared on the site itself.
“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened,” the pop-up read. “See 31 million of you on HIBP!”
HIBP is a website, Have I Been Pwned, that lets you input an email address to see if it has been involved in a leak or data breach.
Data implicated in the leak is believed to include user names, email addresses, encrypted passwords and timestamp data for previous password changes.
The Internet Archive is currently down at the time of writing, having also fallen victim to a series of DDoS, distributed denial of service, attacks.
Hacker group DarkMeta claims to be behind the DDoS attacks. It cites the reasoning for the Internet Archive’s supposed affiliation with the US, in a pro-Palestine statement posted on X.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation founded by Brewster Kahle, who also co-founded the Wayback Machine. That site archives snapshots of websites, acting as a history of the web. Neither website is affiliated with the US government.
Kahle has posted about the outage and site hack on X.
"Yesterday's DDOS attack on @internetarchive repeated today. We are working to bring http://archive.org back online,” he wrote.
They also Tweeted:
UPDATE ⬇️ https://t.co/Sl9oQsKaSO
— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) October 10, 2024
HIBP founder Troy Hunt also responded to the unrolling event on X.
Hunt wrote: “I would have liked to see that disclosure much earlier, but understanding how under attack they are, I think everyone should cut them some slack. They're a non-profit doing great work and providing a service that so many of us rely heavily on.”
The Internet Archive recently lost a legal action raised by book publishers in the US, accusing the site of copyright infringement. It ran an ebook lending service, which let people borrow digital versions of the hard copy books stored in the Internet Archive’s own physical library, and partner libraries.
This ruling led to the removal of 500,000 digital books from the site.
