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The Internet Archive, best known for running the Wayback Machine, has revealed that it has been fighting off distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for three days.
For those unaware, the Wayback Machine allows users to access archived versions of websites to see how they once were, dating as far back as 1996, with over 832 billion archived webpages.
In a blog post, the non-profit organisation announced that it had been warding off DDoS attacks since Sunday (26 May), which sent “tens of thousands of fake information requests per second”, resulting in patchy and inconsistent access to the site.
“Thankfully, the collections are safe, but we are sorry that the denial-of-service attack has knocked us offline intermittently during these last three days,” said Internet Archive founder and digital librarian Brewster Kahle.
“With the support from others and the hard work of staff, we are hardening our defences to provide more reliable access to our library. What is new is this attack has been sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean.”
Sorry to say, https://t.co/rvOhn0byKe is under a ddos attack. The data is not affected, but most services are unavailable.
— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) May 27, 2024
We are working on it. This thread will have updates.
While no threat actor has come forward claiming the DDoS attacks, some users have speculated that it could be a large language model (LLM) scraping data, according to a report by CyberNews.
While the site is up and running at the time of writing, the attacks reportedly are ongoing and could result in further outages.
The Internet Archive has faced criticism from some who claim that storing archived webpages infringes on copyright.
The US book publishing and US recording industries associations are reportedly suing the Internet Archive for this very reason and are “demanding combined damages of hundreds of millions of dollars and diminished services from all libraries”, according to The Internet Archive.
“If our patrons around the globe think this latest situation is upsetting, then they should be very worried about what the publishing and recording industries have in mind,” Kahle said.
“I think they are trying to destroy this library entirely and hobble all libraries everywhere. But just as we’re resisting the DDoS attack, we appreciate all the support in pushing back on this unjust litigation against our library and others.”
Other libraries have also faced major cyber attacks, most notably of late being the British Library, which suffered a major outage after being hit by the Rhysida ransomware gang in October last year.
The library suffered outages for months, preventing access to its online systems and services, as well as physical services.
The British Library is one of the largest in the world, containing over 150 million items, 13.5 million of which are printed books.
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