Internet Archive hit by DDoS attack, forcing most of its services to be temporarily halted



The Internet Archive , which preserves web content, was attacked by a DDoS attack. The service was temporarily unavailable, but was restored at the time of writing.





At 1:00 a.m. on May 28, 2024, the Internet Archive reported that it had been 'under a DDoS attack' on X and Mastodon. According to the Internet Archive, the homepage archive.org was hit by a DDoS attack, causing most of the services to become unavailable. Related data was not affected.


After that, the recovery work was carried out and was completed about an hour later. Administrator Brewster Kahle reported, 'It was a back and forth battle with the attackers. We made some adjustments. Anyway, Happy Memorial Day !'


The attackers' actions to launch a DDoS attack on the non-profit Internet Archive have been criticized on the social site Hacker News as 'like setting fire to a library.' It is unclear whether this was just harassment or if they wanted to measure the effectiveness of the DDoS, but one user pointed out that DDoS attacks are very cheap to carry out, commenting that 'any attempt to analyze the motives, let alone the suspects, will be futile.'

◆Added on May 30, 2024 at 10:45
On May 28, 2024, the Internet Archive released a statement about the DDoS attack. The full text is as follows:

'The Internet Archive, a nonprofit research library that holds millions of historical documents, archived websites, and media content, is now in its third day of fending off intermittent DDoS attacks. Staff say service is unstable but their collections are safe. Access to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which stores the history of more than 866 billion web pages, has also been affected.'

'Since the attack began, the DDoS attack has been delivering tens of thousands of disinformation requests every second. The source of the attack is unknown.'

'Internet Archive founder and digital librarian Brewster Kahle said: 'Thankfully our collections are safe, but we are disappointed that the attack has taken us offline intermittently over the last three days. With the help of others and the hard work of our staff, we are strengthening our defenses to provide more reliable access. What's new is that this attack is persistent, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and, importantly, sneaky.''

'Cyber attacks are becoming increasingly frequent against the Internet Archive and other knowledge institutions, with recent victims including the British Library, the Solano County Public Library in California, the Natural History Museum in Berlin and the London Public Library in Ontario.'

'In addition to the recent wave of cyberattacks, the Internet Archive has been accused of copyright infringement by the American book publishing industry and the recording industry, and is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and reduced service for all archives.'

'If users around the world are upset by this situation, we should be very concerned about what the publishing and recording industries are thinking: They want to completely destroy the Internet Archive and undermine similar services around the world. We appreciate all your support in fighting back against these unjust lawsuits against our archive and other services, just as we are fighting back against the DDoS attacks.'

Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine under DDoS cyber-attack | Internet Archive Blogs
https://blog.archive.org/2024/05/28/internet-archive-and-the-wayback-machine-under-ddos-cyber-attack/

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