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In recent weeks, the digital library dedicated to preserving the history of the Internet has come under attack from the Internet itself. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit library based in California, was founded in 1996 to archive and preserve the World Wide Web. Today, about twenty thousand URLs are stored per second, or about a billion URLs per day. Last week it was revealed that hackers had accessed sensitive information from millions of the archive’s users. Shortly afterwards, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack took the site offline. As of this publication, many of the Internet Archive’s services remain unavailable while staff investigates and upgrades its internal systems (although the Wayback Machine, a popular Internet Archive initiative, is back online). The attacks come after the Internet Archive lost a major legal battle over copyright violations last month. In short, the Internet Archive can’t seem to catch a break. “The @internetarchive team is upbeat, but tired,” Brewster Kahle, the archive’s founder, tweeted on Tuesday.
When the Internet was in its infancy, few worried about archiving it, in part because there wasn’t nearly as much Web content to preserve. Today, it’s a common misconception that publishing text on the Internet is like carving letters in stone, protected in a digital cloud and immune to fires or other disasters that physical books have to worry about. In reality, the Internet has been disappearing since its inception. According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of all web pages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible. To preserve our collective digital history, the Internet Archive uses digital spiders to capture snapshots of the entire Internet. The pages are stored in the Internet Archive’s free repository, the Wayback Machine, which allows users to see what a website used to look like (if you’re curious, here’s CJR’s first archival snapshot, from 1996). The archive also allows users to track changes to government websites and revisit defunct media sites Gawker And The messengerand browse saved cookbooks. “The idea is to build the Library of Alexandria Two,” Kahle said The New Yorker in 2015.
While an accidental fire – believed to have been started by Julius Caesar’s men – destroyed parts of Alexandria One, deliberate cyber attacks have caused a number of serious, albeit non-fatal, stabbings in Alexandria Two (aka the Internet Archive). In late September, attackers stole a user authentication database containing thirty-one million unique records of users’ email addresses, usernames, and encrypted passwords. (Password leakage is particularly sensitive, because people tend to reuse passwords across many platforms.) The hackers left an ominous JavaScript message on the archive’s web page: “Have you ever had the feeling that the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the edge? suffer a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you at HIBP!”
The text “HIBP” refers to “Have I Been Pwned” – a website that allows Internet users to check whether their personal information has been compromised. The hackers sent notice of the security breach to Troy Hunt, the creator of HIBP, on September 30. However, Hunt was traveling and didn’t realize the significance of the breach until almost a week later, according to his X-feed. Hunt eventually notified the Internet Archive, giving the organization seventy-two hours before the data breach was announced. While that crisis was being dealt with, another began: the DDoS attack – a cybercrime in which the attacker floods a service with internet traffic, causing a digital outage – knocked the library offline. It is not clear whether the two attacks are related. “DDOS on Tuesday? The last time it was a Monday. Gosh,” tweeted Kahle, who regularly provides updates on X.
Social media has raised questions surrounding the attack: Who would go after a nonprofit digital library? A group called BlackMeta has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack, citing pro-Palestinian motives. “We believe that highlighting the plight of innocent Palestinian people is essential, and focusing on an important digital resource like the Internet Archive serves to underscore the importance of their stories and experiences,” the group tweeted this weekend. But some say the pro-Palestinian motives are a false flag for two main reasons: first, the archive contains many valuable sources on Palestine that are now inaccessible because of the attack; second, the library is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, public charity, and non-governmental organization, with no direct ties to the U.S. government, Israel, or the Mossad, or to counterterrorism, as X’s Community Notes noted.
At a time when a flood of falsehoods and disinformation are circulating around the election, it is crucial to keep track of what was said in its original form. In other words, we should keep our digital receipts in a safe drawer. According to the Financial timesthis need became increasingly apparent to the Internet Archive after the 2016 elections, as the conversation around fake news intensified. In response, the organization launched several initiatives, including archiving Donald Trump’s television appearances and cataloging his tweets. “It’s not about trying to archive the things that are true, it’s about archiving the conversation. That’s all what people experience,” Kahle told the newspaper at the time.
I spoke with Maria Bustillos, a writer and information activist, about the attack. She noted that the timing of the incidents, so close to the election, was “striking.” Shutting down the Internet Archive, she said, prevents people from “discovering things.” As Bustillos previously wrote for CJR, the Internet Archive is behind Democracy’s Library, which collects government publications around the world and makes them available to journalists, researchers and the general public. “It is a very fundamental form of journalism,” Bustillos wrote.
For now, Democracy’s Library remains inaccessible, as do many of the other services offered by the Internet Archive. While this isn’t the first time bad actors have attacked the archive, the incidents are a reminder of how little stands between the library and a digital abyss. Although other digital archives exist, none began recording the Web as early as the Internet Archive did, making replacement nearly impossible. “The archive lacks strong defenders,” Bustillos told me. “It all falls on one nonprofit.”
Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen is a computational research associate at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. She works on a range of computational projects in the digital media landscape, including influence operations through news media and the information ecosystem. She graduated from Columbia University in 2022 with an MS degree in data journalism.
