The Internet Archive was hit with a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack on Wednesday afternoon, resulting in the service being knocked offline on Thursday.
Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, confirmed the platform experienced a major outage due to DDoS attacks, which resulted in the “defacement of our website” and a major breach that exposed 31 million user accounts. The breach exposed the usernames, emails, and bcrypt password hashes of 31,081,179 archive users, with Kahle confirming the news in a new X post that stated the Internet Archive suffered from “defacement of our website via JS library; breach of usernames/email/salted-encrypted passwords.“
As for the defacement Kahle referenced, the hacker/s injected this message into the platform, “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!” HIBP is a reference to the website “Have I Been Pwned,” which informs users if their account details have been leaked online due to a data breach. Moreover, HIBP did confirm the Internet Archive data breach, writing that 31 million records from Internet Archive users were stolen.
The Australian reports the hacker group known as “SN_BLACKMETA” claimed responsibility for the attack in an X post.
“The Internet Archive has and is suffering from a devastating attack,” the group wrote on the platform Wednesday. “They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of ‘Israel.’“
According to Radware, a cybersecurity solutions provider, SN_BLACKMETA is a “pro-Palestinian hacktivist with potential ties to Sudan“.