The Internet Archive is back online, albeit in a read-only state following a cyberattack that brought down the website’s digital library and Wayback Machine last week. An October 9th cyberattack and data breach hit the site, exposing the information of 31 million unique users from the site’s database, reports The Verge.
The Internet Archive is now back online in a “provisional, read-only manner,” according to founder Brewster Kahle. “Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.”
While users can still search the 916 billion web pages that have been archived over time via the site’s “Wayback Machine,” users cannot currently add an existing web page into the archive.
Kahle says he and his team have gradually been restoring Archive.org services over the last few days, including restoring the team’s email accounts and its crawlers for National Libraries. Staff have kept services offline to allow the Internet Archive staff to examine and strengthen them against future cyberattacks.
Last week, Internet Archive users were met with a pop-up from a hacker claiming the archive had suffered a “catastrophic security breach.” It was later confirmed by Have I Been Pwned that the security breach had exposed unique records containing email addresses, screen names, hashed passwords, and other internal data for 31 million unique accounts.
Oddly enough, the Internet Archive cyberattack came just a few weeks after search giant Google began adding links to archived websites in the Wayback Machine to its search engine, with Wayback Machine results linked in Google search results.