Internet Archive, also known as Wayback Machine, subjected to a DDoS attack

The Internet Archive, best known for its Wayback Machine, has been subjected to a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for several days. The nonprofit says it is in contact with the attackers, but their motives are still unclear…

Internet Archive, also known as Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive is a Californian non-profit organization whose ambitious goal is to create a digital library of “all knowledge.”

Today, it is almost synonymous with its best-known project, the Wayback Machine. The goal of this machine is to maintain a comprehensive record of the public web so that when websites go offline or web pages are deleted, a previous snapshot can be accessed.

According to the organization, its archive contains:

• 835 billion websites
• 44 million books and texts
• 15 million audio recordings (including 255,000 live concerts)
• 10.6 million videos (including 2.6 million television news broadcasts)
• 4.8 million images
• 1 million software programs

Under ongoing DDoS attack

PCMag reported that the company said it was under an ongoing DDoS attack, a type of attack that uses bot networks to repeatedly bombard a server with millions of requests that exceed its capacity, knocking it offline for everyone else.

The attacks began over the long Memorial Day weekend, according to the California-based nonprofit and several users who said they were unable to access the digital archive’s website for several hours on Monday.

“Archive.org is under a DDoS attack,” the nonprofit’s X-Account wrote Monday morning. “Data is unaffected, but most services are unavailable.”

A few hours later, the nonprofit added that there had been a “back and forth with the attackers.” The organization said it had made some changes to its service, but did not provide any further details about the identity of the attackers or a possible reason for the attack.

The archive has been sued several times by publishers and music labels for copyright infringement. The organization defended its archiving of copyrighted material by comparing itself to a lending library, although it has lost at least one of these cases.

Since it is unlikely that any of these companies are behind the attacks, the mystery currently remains.

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash