When I visited the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) on Wednesday afternoon, The edge was greeted by a pop-up window saying the site had been hacked. After closing the message, the page loaded normally, albeit slowly.
However, as of 5:30 p.m. ET, the pop-up had disappeared, as had the rest of the site, leaving only a placeholder message saying “Internet Archive services are temporarily offline” and redirecting visitors to the site's account on X for updates receive.
Here's what the popup said:
“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive is on hold, constantly on the verge of a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”
HIBP refers to Have I Been Pwned?, a website where people can look up whether or not their information has been published in cyber-leaked data. It's unclear what's happening to the site, but attacks on services like TweetDeck have exploited XSS or cross-site scripting vulnerabilities with similar effects.
Jason Scott, archivist and software curator at The Internet Archive, said the site was the victim of a DDoS attack, posting on Mastodon: “According to Twitter, they're just doing it to do it.” Simply because they can. No statement, no idea, no demands.”
An account on The account also posted about DDoS attacks on the archive in May, and Scott has previously posted about attacks apparently aimed at disrupting the Internet Archive.
We have contacted the organization for more information.
Update, October 9th: Note that the site has been replaced with a placeholder.