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After dealing with a long distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack before then suffering a data breach affecting 31 million, the Internet Archive appears to have suffered a third data breach just in October.
Earlier this month, the Russia-based SN-Blackmeta hacking group claimed a DDoS attack on the Internet Archive, which resulted in its Wayback Machine and other sites and services being inaccessible.
Not long after, those who attempted to access the Internet Archive were greeted by a pop-up warning of a data breach affecting 31,081,179 account owners.
“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach?” the pop-up said.
“It just happened. See 31 million of you on [Have I Been Pwned]!”
Now it appears that the Internet Archive has suffered a third incident after hackers exploited API tokens that had not been rotated following the previous breach to gain access to its Zendesk support platform.
With the access, the threat actors gained access to support tickets dating back as far as 2018 and had the potential to download them.
These tickets may have contained personal identification documents.
Using the Internet Archive Team’s Zendesk email, the threat actors announced the latest breach.
“It’s dispiriting to see that even after being made aware of the breach two weeks ago, IA has still not done the due diligence of rotating many of the API keys that were exposed in their GitLab secrets,” said the email.
“As demonstrated by this message, this includes a Zendesk token with perms to access 800K+ support tickets sent to [email protected] since 2018.
“Whether you were trying to ask a general question, or requesting the removal of your site from the Wayback Machine – your data is now in the hands of some random guy. If not me, it’d be someone else.
“Here’s hoping that they’ll get their shit together now.”
While October has seen the Internet Archive suffer a hat-trick of cyber incidents, the group also suffered a cyber attack in May this year, which saw its sites taken down for several days.
“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.”
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