Internet Archive Hacked
Lawrence Abrams (Hacker News):
Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records.
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Hunt told BleepingComputer that the threat actor shared the Internet Archive’s authentication database nine days ago and it is a 6.4GB SQL file named “ia_users.sql.” The database contains authentication information for registered members, including their email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data.
[…]
While the Internet Archive is facing both a data breach and DDoS attacks at the same, it is not believed that the two attacks are connected.
Just in terms of privacy, it’s worth noting that anyone who has uploaded something on IA already has their email address publicly viewable.
This isn’t something that commonly known (even judging by comments here) but in the publicly viewable metadata of every upload it contains the uploader’s IA account email address. So from a security perspective it’s bad but from a privacy perspective a lot of users probably weren’t aware of this detail if they’ve uploaded anything.
Previously:
- Google Search Adds Links to Internet Archive
- Lost Internet Archive Accounts
- Book Publishers v. Internet Archive
Update (2024-10-21): Lawrence Abrams (Hacker News):
The Internet Archive was breached again, this time on their Zendesk email support platform after repeated warnings that threat actors stole exposed GitLab authentication tokens.
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In the case of the Internet Archive, there was no money to be made by trying to extort the organization. However, as a well-known and extremely popular website, it definitely boosted a person's reputation amongst this community.
We need a fully separate Internet archive as a backup.
