Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

I guess this is an attempt to discredit them.

After working at many, many companies, security is usually very bad. This is typical. Not changing access tokens is also very common.

Discrediting someone usually has a goal of pushing customers to another source though. There is no other source of this information, so what would be the point?
- Destroy a source of historical documents so that the past can be contested. Sow doubt, confusion, deniability. Hide evidence of past crimes, or inconvenient documents. Plant documents, etc.
- Generating turmoil just prior to the USA election maybe?
- War of attrition is my guess

Why are people fucking with the Internet Archive? Who benefits?

People use Archive links to avoid giving sites traffic.

This is a problem for advertisers and media corps.

Not saying they're the ones doing this, but they'd definitely benefit.
- Wouldn't put it past them...
- I've enjoyed using Wayback Machine on journalistic articles where they try to retcon information, but the original copy had already been captured. The Ministry of Truth hates archive.org.
- Someone else looked to the group claiming responsibility for this. It's a pro-Palestinian Russian group
- Why is this a problem, how would it affect real availability of ads? Except maybe tracking users.
Well right wingers want to ban books and services like IA make that harder since they provide easy access to download or digitally borrow those books. It makes it harder for them to deny people access to those books since they can find them online. Of course, there are other ways people can still obtain those books, IA isn't the only one, but it's the easiest and the most convent.
- I'll give you my opinion though you haven't asked for it:
  
  Some right wingers (libertarian mostly) don't want to ban books, they want books in fact to be reliably available, and having one centralized Internet Archive to store all of them is not reliable.
  
  (Or in the same logic for humanity to be knowledgeable and resistant to propaganda, and treating sources' availability as a given being harmful towards that goal - naive people can believe wrong things.)
  
  See Babylon V example with kicking the ant hive again and again to some well-meaning goal, of the evolution kind.
  
  Mind that I don't think these people have such an intent.
  
  It's just in my childhood someone has gaslighted me into trying to be optimistic in such cases. Like "if someone is digging a grave for you, just wait till they're done, you'll get a nice pond". Same as a precedent that is created with one intent and interpretation, but works for all possible intents and interpretations, because it's a real world event.
  
  So, other than gaslighting, real effects are real. Including positive ones, like all of us right now realizing that a centralized IA is unacceptable, we need something like "IA@home", with a degree of forkability without duplicating the data, so that someone who'd somehow hijack the private key or whatever identifying said new IA's authority wouldn't be able to harm existing versions and they wouldn't require much more storage.
  
  Shit, I can't stop thinking about that "common network and identities and metadata exchange, but data storage shared per communities one joins, Freenet-like" idea, but I don't even remotely know where to start developing it and doubt I'll ever.
Copyright holders compete with old content clogging up the works. They wish the library would burn.
Maybe they're just trolls doing it for the lulz.

Okay, enough is enough. The Internet Archive is both essential infrastructure and irreplaceable historical record; it cannot be allowed to fall. Rather than just hoping the Archive can defend itself, I say It's time to hunt down and counterattack the scum perpetrating this!

Lol you're gonna pull that thread and at the end of the sweater is gonna be the CIA or Russia.

Edit: in = is
- Did I stutter?
- Israel more likely. Making an attack completely useless for Palestine and calling yourself a pro-Palestine group - would be exactly their kind of braindead, but capable.
Where are the anonymous group and 4chan autists? They should attack these assholes. Attacking internet archive is like kicking a kitten. Everyone will hate you for it.

We need IA full mirrors. This is too critical to leave to this one company.

Knowing the folks at IA I'm sure they would love a backup. They would love a community. I'm sure they don't want to be the only ones doing this. But dang, they've got like 99 Petabytes of data. I don't know about you, but my NAS doesn't have that laying around...
- I wonder if someone can come up with some kind of distributed storage that isn't insanely slow. Kinda like a CDN but on personal devices. I'm thinking like SETI@HOME did with distributed compute.
  
  Edit: this is kinda like torrents but where the contents are changing frequently.
- That is an insane amount of storage. How much does it grow every year and is it stable growth or accelerating?

This again??

This time once archive.org is back online again... is it possible to get torrents of some of their popular data storage? For example I wouldn't imagine their catalog of books with expired copyright to be very big. Would love a community way to keep the data alive if something even worse happens in the future (and their track record isn't looking good now)

Like this idea
Yep, that seems like the ideal decentralized solution. If all the info can be distributed via torrent, anyone with spare disk space can help back up the data and anyone with spare bandwidth can help serve it.
- Most of us can't afford the sort of disk capacity they use, but it would be really cool if there were a project to give volunteers pieces of the archive so that information was spread out. Then volunteers could specify if they want to contribute a few gigabytes to multiple terabytes of drive space towards the project and the software could send out packets any time the content changes. Hmm this description sounds familiar but I can't think of what else might be doing something similar -- anyone know of anything like that that could be applied to the archive?
- There's an issue with torrents, only the most popular ones get replicated and the process is manual\social.
  
  Something like Freenet is needed, which automatically "spreads" data over machines contributing storage, but Freenet is an unreliable storage, basically like a cache where older and unwanted stuff gets erased.
  
  So it should be something like Freenet, but possibly with some "clusters" or "communities" with a central (cryptography-enabled) authority of each being able to determine the state of some collection of data as a whole, and pick priorities. My layman's understanding is that this would be similar to something between Freenet and Ceph, LOL. More like a cluster filesystem spread over many nodes, not like cache.
I'm pretty sure all their content is available by torrent, so you could mirror the data and provide the torrent files for direct download. It'll probably be here when it's back up: https://archive.org/details/public-domain-archive
Anna’s Archive does this. I think its a really good way to make it difficult to take them down.

Hopefully this hack starts some conversations on how they can ensure longevity for their project. Seems they’re being attacked on multiple fronts now.

The majority of Reddit discourse on this is wild. The crowd there is going HARD to try and paint IA in the most negative light possible.

I know we don't like Reddit here, but for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1g7w0rh/internet_archive_issues_continue_this_time_with/

It's almost as if the "hackers" and/or copyright holders are running that conversation.

Since it's Reddit, I would guess copyright sockpuppets are steering the narrative to help damage them further.

Not this crap again

Wtf

Apparently, BlackMeta is behind the DDoS attack to the Internet Archive. Apparently they are pro-Palestine hacktivists - their X account also has some russian written in it.

(Edit) Also, Internet Archive is banned on China since 2012 and Russia since 2015.

Yes they are a "pro-Palestine" Russian based hacker group... Nothing funny going on here no sir
- https://xcancel.com/Sn_darkmeta/status/1845502888480579860#m
Definitely not their genocidal neighbors terrorizing as usual. /s

Quick question for those more in the know: Have these events disrupted IA's ability to archive pages? I ask because I was recently talking with a security guy about a novel malware that used a hacked webpage for command injection. One possible motive that came to mind, if the archiving was disrupted would be to cover tracks for a similar malware. Inject code, perform malicious activity, revert, then, there's more time before the control code is discovered.

Hope they had a backup