Internet Archive, the world’s largest digital library, recently experienced a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that caused several of its services to go offline over the course of a few days. Thankfully, the non-profit organization has managed to restore most of its services, including the Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning and national library crawls, email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications. Despite this progress, the team is still working diligently to bring back additional services, some of which may initially operate in read-only mode before full restoration is achieved in the coming days.
The incident also involved a website defacement where a threat actor claimed to have accessed 31 million unique records from Internet Archive’s IT systems, compromising email addresses, screen names, and bcrypt password hashes. Although the breach was confirmed by data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned on October 9 and later acknowledged by Internet Archive, founder Brewster Kahle reassured the public on October 11 that the data was secure. In a recent blog post, the non-profit reiterated this sentiment, stating that the stored data of Internet Archive remains safe. However, specific details regarding the measures taken to safeguard the exposed data were not disclosed by Kahle or the organization.
Internet Archive is now focused on rebuilding and strengthening its defenses in a cautious and deliberate manner to enhance its security moving forward. The priority is to ensure the organization emerges from this incident resilient and more secure than before. Additionally, Internet Archive expressed concern over the rise in cyber-attacks targeting other library institutions such as the British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and Calgary Public Library. The non-profit hopes that these incidents are not indicative of a troubling trend within the library community.
In light of these challenges, Brewster Kahle urged the Internet Archive community to show support by making donations to help sustain the organization’s operations and security efforts. As Internet Archive continues to recover from the recent cyber-attacks, the dedication of its team and the support of its community will be essential in maintaining the integrity of this valuable digital resource.