The Internet Archive Faces Continuous DDoS Attacks
If you have been unable to access the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine in the past few days, it is due to an attack.
The non-profit organization has revealed that they are currently in the “third day of fending off intermittent DDoS attacks in a blog post.
Over the weekend on Memorial Day in the US, the organization stated on their X site that most of their services were unavailable due to malicious actors targeting their website with “tens of thousands of fake information requests per second“.
The organization warned early Tuesday morning that they “still suffer from service disruption” as the attackers have not stopped targeting.
However, the website data seems to be unaffected, and you can still search for content from previous pages whenever you can access them.
Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive, stated in a statement: “Fortunately, the collections are safe, but we are sorry that the attack disrupted service and made us intermittently offline for the past three days.
He added: “With support from others and hard work of the staff, we are enhancing our defenses to provide more reliable access to our library. The new thing is that this attack was continuous, impactful, targeted, and adaptable“.
The source of the attacks has not been identified, but the organization talked about the repeated targeting of libraries and similar institutions these days.
One of the institutions mentioned was the British Library which had its information system held hostage for ransom by a group of hackers last year. It also mentioned how it was sued by the American book and recording industries, accusing it of copyright violations.