Victim again: Wayback Machine was subjected to a new attack and user data was exposed

Data of 31 million Wayback Machine users leaked The platform was the target of a recent cyber attack. According to the report, users who tried to access the service last Wednesday (09) encountered a warning placed on the page by the attacker. BleepingComputer.

“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive was running on USB sticks and was constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. “You see 31 million people in HIBP!” the message said. The term the hacker mentioned means: Have I been pwned data breach notification service.

Troy Hunt, the creator of HIBP, confirmed that he received a 6.4 GB file containing data from members registered with the service provided by the Internet Archive, which allows you to view old versions of websites. The compilation includes: names, email addresses, hashed passwords, and timestamps of password changesamong other information.

Hunt told the publication: Cyberattack on the Wayback Machine likely occurred on September 28The most recent date record in the file. For now, there is no information about how the system was breached or whether more data was compromised.

DDoS attack takes website offline

Besides data theft Wayback Machine was also the target of a denial of service (DDoS) attackWhen a large amount of requests are sent simultaneously, exceeding the network capacity. The malicious campaign took the page offline yesterday morning, and at the time of writing the page is currently unavailable.

According to Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, the JavaScript library the attacker used to display the banner to visitors has been disabled. Moreover, page systems cleaned and security updatedbut did not set a deadline for the site to be back online.

What we know: DDOS attack stopped for now; defacement of our website via the JS library; breach of usernames/email/salted encrypted passwords.

What we did: Disabled JS library, cleaned systems, upgraded security.

We will share more as we know.

— Brewster Kahle (@brewster_kahle) October 10, 2024

An account named “SN_Blackmeta” on It is unknown whether this campaign is linked to the data breach.