The world’s largest internet archive is under siege — and fighting back

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Hackers breached the Internet Archive, whose outsize cultural importance belies a small budget and lean infrastructure.

There are few organizations dedicated to the gargantuan task of preserving the vast, ever-shifting record of human activity that is the internet. The largest such record belongs to a nonprofit based in an old church in San Francisco that operates on a smaller annual budget than the D.C. Public Library.

It is currently under siege.

Hackers struck the Internet Archive last week, leaking the information of millions of users and defacing it with a message taunting the nonprofit’s website for running on a shoestring budget. To prevent further leaks, the Internet Archive’s team took the site, including its popular Wayback Machine, offline. It’s the first time in its almost 30-year history that it has suffered an outage of longer than a few hours, founder Brewster Kahle told The Washington Post. Most of the site remains offline a week later.

The cyberattack kicked off a frenzied race to restore access to the Internet Archive and the more than 900 billion webpages it preserves on the Wayback Machine, its archival service. It was also a rude awakening. To Kahle, that hackers would set their sights on a free repository of digital history, seemingly without an agenda or a ransom, is hard to imagine.

“I don’t know,” Kahle said. “Why kick the cat?”

The attack drew allusions online to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the sprawling repository of knowledge in ancient Egypt that writers of the time claim Julius Caesar accidentally torched. It’s a dramatic comparison, but most agree that the Internet Archive has played a foundational role in the upkeep of online history. Other web archival services exist, but the Internet Archive, which was founded in 1996, maintains the largest and oldest archive of the internet.

If you’ve ever had to search for an old or defunct website, you’ve probably been directed to the Internet Archive or its Wayback Machine. The organization archives websites cited by editors on Wikipedia. Attorneys plumb the Wayback Machine for evidence to use in court. The Internet Archive was among several groups that preserved deleted tweets by former president Donald Trump, it wrote in 2017.

Kahle and his team see the mission of the Internet Archive as a noble one — to build a “library of everything” and ensure records are kept in an online environment where websites change and disappear by the day.

“We’re all dreamers,” said Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive’s director of library services. “We believe in the mission of the Internet Archive, and we believe in the promise of the internet.”

But the site has, at times, courted controversy. The Internet Archive faces lawsuits from book publishers and music labels brought in 2020 and 2023 for digitizing copyrighted books and music, which the organization has argued should be permissible for noncommercial, archival purposes. Kahle said the hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties from the lawsuits could sink the Internet Archive.

Those lawsuits are ongoing. Now, the Internet Archive has also had to turn its attention to fending off cyberattacks. In May, the Internet Archive was hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a fairly common type of internet warfare that involves flooding a target site with fake traffic. The archive experienced intermittent outages as a result. Kahle said it was the first time the site had been targeted in its history.

Last week, the DDoS attacks resumed. But things escalated quickly. On Oct. 9, in a separate, more critical security breach, hackers inserted a message on the Internet Archive’s main page bragging they had stolen information from 31 million of its users. Have I Been Pwned, a service that checks for leaked emails and passwords online, confirmed that it received a database of email addresses and passwords and verified that they were stolen from the Internet Archive, cybersecurity news site BleepingComputer reported.

*The message that greeted visitors to the Internet Archive on Oct. 17 after the site suffered a cyberattack. (Daniel Wu/TWP)*

Scott Helme, a cybersecurity researcher, told The Post that if hackers compromised the Internet Archive to the extent that they were able to deface the website, they could have done much worse.

“With that level of access, genuinely, they could have done anything,” Helme said. “They could have put inappropriate materials. If they were politically motivated, they could have used the platform to make statements … they could have used the website to distribute malware.”

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