The Internet Archive is now back online after a data breach and DDoS attack in the past week.
However, the service is back online in a read-only state after the cyberattack brought down the library. Last week, Internet Archive was hacked and a DDoS attack kicked the site offline on October 9th. In the breach, the hackers stole the user authentication database that contained 31 million unique records.
The founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, says that the website is back online in a “provisional, read-only manner.” He also said, “Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.”
You can check out his tweet below.
Well, you can access the Wayback Machine to search its database of 916 billion web pages that have been archived over the years. However, currently, the functionality is limited as users cannot capture an existing webpage into the archive.
Kahle and his team have been at it since the breach to restore the services back to normal. They are also trying to bring back crawlers for National Libraries.
The service was taken offline so that the staff of the company could examine and strengthen the website for the future.
Last week, a pop-up on the site from hackers claimed that the site had been hacked. Later in the week, Have I Ever Been Pwned confirmed the news that data was stolen. According to them, the breach included email addresses, screen names, hashed passwords, and other internal data for 31 unique email accounts.
The hack comes just a month after Google started adding links to archived websites in the Wayback Machine. Earlier this year, Google removed its own cached page links and started showing the Internet Archive links in its search results
