When visiting The Web Archive (www.archive.org) on Wednesday afternoon, The Verge was greeted by a pop-up claiming the positioning had been hacked. After closing the message, the positioning loaded usually, albeit slowly.
Nonetheless, as of 5:30PM ET, the popup was gone, however so was the remainder of the positioning, leaving solely a placeholder message saying “Web Archive companies are quickly offline” and directing guests to the positioning’s account on X for updates.
Right here’s what the popup stated:
“Have you ever ever felt just like the Web Archive runs on sticks and is consistently on the verge of struggling a catastrophic safety breach? It simply occurred. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”
HIBP refers to Have I Been Pwned?, a web site the place folks can lookup whether or not or not their data has been revealed in knowledge leaked from cyber assaults. It’s unclear what is occurring with the positioning, however assaults on companies like TweetDeck have exploited XSS or cross-site scripting vulnerabilities with comparable results.
Jason Scott, an archivist and software program curator of The Web Archive, stated the positioning was experiencing a DDoS assault, posting on Mastodon that “In keeping with their twitter, they’re doing it simply to do it. Simply because they’ll. No assertion, no thought, no calls for.”
An account on X referred to as SN_Blackmeta stated it was behind the assault and implied that one other assault was deliberate for tomorrow. The account additionally posted about DDoSing the Archive in Might, and Scott has beforehand posted about assaults seemingly geared toward disrupting the Web Archive.
We’ve reached out to the group to study extra data.
Replace, October ninth: Famous the positioning has been changed with a placeholder.
