in a read-only condition. The website was shut down by a data breach along with a DDoS cyberattack back on October 9, where hackers obtained more than 31 million user information such as names, addresses, and others.
Now, after all the events, the digital library was able to come back online in a read-only manner.
“Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.” the founder Brewster Kahle stated in his X post.
Even if it seems that the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is working now properly, we can say that it has some issues. So, every user can have access to the Wayback Machine to search for almost 916 billion web pages that are already archived, but it is not possible to access yet an existing web page in the archive.
The founder, Brewster Kahle, and his team are trying to restore as much as possible, and even entirely the Archive.org website and its services, including bringing back all of the team email accounts along with its crawlers for National Libraries.
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The reason why all of the services were offline is because the Internet Archive staff must examine, analyze, and strengthen to avoid future cyberattacks.
We must mention that on the day of the Internet Archive cyberattack, users saw a pop-up from a hacker who was claiming that the Internet Archive website had suffered a “catastrophic security breach”. After this event on the website, the Have I Been Pwned website confirmed the allegations that all user’s data were stolen by hackers. So, the hackers managed to obtain email addresses, screen names, passwords, and other personal information from 31 million unique users.
Maybe this attack is not just an accident because this cyberattack and also the Internet Archive outage came shortly after Google started to add links to archived websites in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine service.
Google removed its cached web page links at the beginning of the year, and the Wayback Machine represents an effective way to have access to older versions of websites along with all archived pages.
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