Internet Archive Back Online After Cyberattack and Data Breach

The Internet Archive’s digital library is gradually resuming operations after a week-long outage caused by a severe cyberattack. The organization suffered a data breach and a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive offers free access to a vast collection of historical web pages through its Wayback Machine service. The platform houses over 150 billion web pages, approximately 250,000 films, and 500,000 audio recordings.

On October 9, hackers stole and published the data of 31 million users. Visitors to the site were met with a pop-up message notifying them of the breach, along with a link to the service Have I Been Pwned, which allows individuals to check whether their personal information was exposed due to the data leak.

To prevent further attacks, the administration decided to temporarily shut down the site. According to Brewster Kahle’s latest update, several key services of the Internet Archive have already been restored. These include the Wayback Machine, Archive-It, the scanning and data collection systems of national libraries, as well as email, blog, customer support, and social media channels.

The Internet Archive team is working around the clock across different time zones to bring other services back online. In the coming days, more services are expected to be restored, some of which will operate in “read-only” mode, as full recovery will require additional time.

Kahle emphasized that the organization is taking a cautious and thoughtful approach to restoring and strengthening its systems’ defenses. The top priority is ensuring a more reliable and secure operation of the Internet Archive once it returns fully online.

Netscout, which conducted the analysis of the incident, recorded 24 DDoS attacks on Autonomous System (ASN) 7941, used by the Internet Archive. The first attack lasted more than three hours and affected three of the organization’s IP addresses.

Netscout experts warn that such attacks could inspire hackers to attempt further breaches.

Bruno Kurtic, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Security, considers such breaches virtually inevitable: “Perimeters will be breached, vulnerabilities will be exploited… eventually, attackers will find their way to your data repositories.”

According to Kurtic, the primary issue for most enterprises is their lack of awareness about the exact location of their data. “Data is mobile, proliferating, and created at an exponential rate,” the expert noted.

To safeguard information, Kurtic recommends proactive policy management, as well as tracking the movement, encryption, and hashing of data. “Monitoring access and continuously scanning to update classifications across hundreds of petabytes is a complex, yet essential task,” the specialist emphasized.