[Ads-l] The Internet Archive has been hacked and DDoSed

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

The Internet Archive is currently down as indicated in a tweet from
Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive:

https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1844791590755144002
https://archive.org/

Recently, the Internet Archive was subjected to a Distributed
Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack. In other words, coordinated attackers
flooded the Internet Archive servers with data packets to prevent
users from accessing the service. This has also happened in the past.

https://x.com/brewster_kahle/status/1844326137499177312

Before the latest DDoS attack the Internet Archive was hacked
according to an article by Alan Friedman on the website Phone Arena.
The hacker(s) downloaded the authentication database of the website.
The "last timestamp on the file is September 28, 2024". So the hack
probably occurred at the end of September or early October.

https://x.com/PhoneArena/status/1844804349471359258
https://www.phonearena.com/news/data-breach-affects-31-million-registered-users-to-a-site_id163620

If you have an account on the Internet Archive then your email has
been leaked. Your password on the Internet Archive is vulnerable
because a Bcrypt-hashed version of your password has also been leaked.
If the previous sentence is technical gobbledygook to you then ignore
it.

The key point is: You should avoid using the same password on multiple
websites. You should change your password at the Internet Archive when
the system returns. You cannot change your password currently because
the Internet Archive is down.

A recent tweet from Brewster Kahle indicates that “The data is safe.
Services are offline as we examine and strengthen them.”

https://x.com/brewster_kahle/status/1844790609573277792

Garson

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org