The Internet Archive is under attack, with a popup claiming a ‘catastrophic’ breach

Archived something someone doesn't want to be seen by the world... like any and all since-removed misinformation for one...

I have zero proof of this so take it for the musing it is, but the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine can be used to view articles that have been taken offline (sometimes for political reasons). The IA is a very accessible way to prove that once something is on the Internet, it's out there forever. I used it in a recent post to show an Israeli newspaper article that argued Israel had a right to not just Palestine, but Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and other territories. It was taken off the newspaper's website a few days later, but IA had it.

This may explain why no one is taking credit, and there are no demands. Or it could very well be another reason, including people just being assholes.

Yeah, this is a bit like vandalizing a library. They are providing a valuable public service, leave them alone.

It's probably for the lulz I guess. There's only a few places left on the internet that are decent and good, archive being one, so why not shit all over it? People are so dumb.

There's currently a fuck ton of hacking going on everywhere maybe just prior to the US elections maybe something unrelated but there's definitely a concerted effort to turn the internet on its head.

In this case it’s looking like people trying to showcase their skill and possibly get bragging rights or at least a reputation for doing these attacks which they can use to earn money from others for these types of services.

We just need to accept that there's terrible people in this world

We see this and think of an amazing and essential public service. A capitalist sees this and tries to find a way to make money with it, and the first step is to ruin the free product.

The attacker(s) apparently just did it to do it.

Dipshits thought it was affiliated with the US government and attacked it to "avenge" Gaza.

I just sent a DMCA takedown last week to remove my site. They've claimed to follow meta tags and robots.txt since 1998, but no, they had over 1,000,000 of my pages going back that far. They even had the robots.txt configured for them archived from 1998.

I'm tired of people linking to archived versions of things that I worked hard to create. Sites like Wikipedia were archiving urls and then linking to the archive, effectively removing branding and blocking user engagement.

Not to mention that I'm losing advertising revenue if someone views the site in an archive. I have fewer problems with archiving if the original site is gone, but to mirror and republish active content with no supported way to prevent it short of legal action is ridiculous. Not to mention that I lose control over what's done with that content -- are they going to let Google train AI on it with their new partnership?

I'm not a fan. They could easily allow people to block archiving, but they choose not to. They offer a way to circumvent artist or owner control, and I'm surprised that they still exist.

So... That's what I think is wrong with them.

From a security perspective it's terrible that they were breached. But it is kind of ironic -- maybe they can think of it as an archive of their passwords or something.

https://archive.org/donate This would be it if it were up and running. I wonder if there's any other avenues?

For e-mails, you can just get firefox relay with your own subdomain and generate infinite e-mail masks for 1$ a month. I usually take "nameofshop@mysubdomain.mozmail.com" for example. It's pretty great because you just make the masks on the fly.

I recently went through most of my accounts and randomized the username, with the thought here being to limit the likelihood of one site being compromised leading to accounts at other sites being compromised. I don’t have to remember them due to using a password manager, so it’s really no skin off my nose.

I’ll use this as a reminder to everyone to improve your security. Some ideas:

use a password manager and use random usernames and passwords
have multiple email accounts, and don’t use your “main” email w/ random signups - I use a simple mnemonic, like “<user>-<purpose>@domain.com”; so “me-shopping@domain.com” or “me-games@domain.com” so it’s easy for me to remember, but unlikely for a lazy hacker to pwn other accounts (a lot of these are automated); my real email is “me@different-domain.com”
use 2FA if offered, even if it’s stupid SMS or email based; having any extra step can deter an attacker

Sucks that people are targeting IA, I hope there isn’t any lasting damage and that this is a simple defacement/DOS.

thanks for the advices ! Would you recommend a particular password manager?

Point 2... if you pay for a email aliasing service, you will be locked in. What I suggest is using plus addressing. e.g.

example+83hdo72@example.com

As long as you keep using randomized ones, this'll be as good as an alias against automated and manual login attempts. It just does not hide your base email, which would be

example@example.com

Many email services offer some free aliases. For example, I use one alias, along with my main email that is only used for important services. Other than that, I have an alias that is used for online accounts. This way, your main inbox is free of spammers. And even if your main address were to be the target of a spammer, the automatic spamming software most likely will not chop off the plus part, so you can easily block that email with the specific plus identifier. Not as good as external email aliasing services, but at least you won't be locked into the email aliasing service. Bitwarden has a generator for such things, really nice tbh.

with as long as this has been going on it really surprises me that nothing has come out as a motive. it seems kind of pointless to do this sort of thing and not make your intentions known

maybe it's a government or organization upset that they are keeping archives of things they don't like

I take it you've never had to log into a printer with an AD account before?

Yeah, I went out to 32 characters once. Until I needed to work on a printer.

Spare a thought for the users with accounts who upload content to IA for you to enjoy.

Permanently Deleted

Who would take down what is the digital equivalent to the Library of Alexandria?

I can think of a few possibilities

1: peddlers of misinformation

2: people who love the poorly educated and want the misdeeds of their political allies to be forgotten.

3: copyright trolls.

Can't figure out if this is a joke or serious, so just in case, you might want to look up what happened to the Library of Alexandria.