Reports: “The Internet Archive is Under Attack, With a Breach Revealing Info For 31 Million Accounts” & “The Internet Archive Taken Down by DDoS Attacks”

From The Verge:

When visiting The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) on Wednesday afternoon, The Verge was greeted by a pop-up claiming the site had been hacked. Just after 9PM ET, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle confirmed the breach and said the website had been defaced with the notification via a JavaScript library.

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HIBP refers to Have I Been Pwned?, a website where people can look up whether or not their information has been published in data leaked from cyber attacks. HIBP operator Troy Hunt confirmed to Bleeping Computer that nine days ago, he received a file containing “email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data” for 31 million unique email addresses, and confirmed it was valid by matching data with a user’s account.

A tweet from HIBP said 54 percent of the accounts were already in its database from previous breaches. In posts on his account, Hunt gave further details on the timeline, from contacting the IA about the breach on October 6th, and moving forward with the disclosure process until their site was defaced and DDoS’d today at the same time they were loading the data into HIBP to begin notifying affected users.

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From Engadget:

The Internet Archive has been hit with a series of DDoS attacks this week that have taken the service offline. The Verge noticed a popup on the site today when the online database went down. The popup has since disappeared, but the site is not currently available.

According to security researcher Troy Hunt, the DDoS attack came just as the Internet Archive was preparing to disclose a previous breach of its site that resulted in the theft of more than 31 million records.

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