The Internet Archive: A Precarious Situation

Have you ever felt like the internet archive runs on sticks and stones and is constantly on the verge of a major security breach? It's a daunting thought, but it's a reality the internet archive is currently facing.

The internet archive, a website that literally archives the history of the internet, has been under attack. A data breach exposed 31 million email addresses and password hashes, its open library lost a critical legal battle, its website was defaced with some JavaScript graffiti, and it's been getting DDoSed non-stop. The website is currently offline, and the situation is precarious.

The internet archive is more than just a website; it's a repository of the world's knowledge. It contains over 890 billion archived web pages, weighing in at nearly 100 petabytes. The data is practically irreplaceable, and the only company that might be able to replace it is Google.

The internet archive was founded by Brewster Kahle, an advocate for universal access to all knowledge, in 1996. The website is a free, nonprofit service that benefits the world. However, not everybody is a fan of the internet archive. Some people want legitimate content to be memory-holed forever.

The internet archive also offers a service called Open Library, which was founded by Kahle along with the late Aaron Swartz. Open Library digitizes physical books and allows one digital copy to be lent out for each physical copy that's owned. It sounds reasonable, but they were recently sued by a bunch of publishers claiming copyright infringement, and the publishers won.

The lawsuit could result in over $600 million in damages. But now, let's move to the timeline of the recent hacks. Hibp, a website that helps people find out if their data has been compromised in a data breach, was informed of the internet archive's data breach on September 30th. The internet archive got notified on October 6th and provided a 72-hour window before making the data breach public on October 8th.

Brewster Kahle posted about a DoS attack occurring, joking about it coming on a Tuesday instead of a Monday. However, the internet archive has been facing aggressive DoS attacks going all the way back to May. On October 9th, Kahle posted again, but this time it was a lot more somber. The website was defaced with some JavaScript library, which triggered an alert message about the data breach before it was officially disclosed.

Finally, as of October 10th, the website is still being attacked and is completely offline. Things are not looking good, but that brings up a big question: what sort of sick, twisted hacker would want to mess with the internet archive, and why?

An activist group called Black Meta is claiming responsibility and will continue to attack until all their sisters are completely down. They posted a crazy video an hour ago, which I found kind of funny because it uses a lot of the same stock photography that I use in my videos.

In the video, they say they're not a bunch of teenagers, which means that they're probably just a bunch of teenagers. They have a political message about the situation in the Middle East, which doesn't make a ton of sense because attacking the internet archive isn't going to make people like you.

The only explanation is that it's a false flag. I have no idea who the real hacker is, but I'm sure you're watching this video right now, and I have a message for you: if you let the internet archive go, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you so much as delete a single website in that archive, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

This has been the code report. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.