The Internet Archive Returns Just in the Nick of Time

After its website was crippled for nearly a month by a cyberattack, the Internet Archive announced on Monday that it had restored one of its most valuable services—the Save Page Now feature that allows users to add copies of webpages to the organization’s digital library.

In a social media post, the Internet Archive said web pages that users had attempted to save since October 9 are beginning to be archived now, although it did not provide an estimate for when the process would be completed. So, if you were worried that all of that election coverage was in danger of disappearing, the Archive says it’s handling the backlog. And if you stopped archiving because it was down, get back to work.

The organization had been operating its collection in read-only mode since October 21 as it steadily worked to restore services.

A hacking group calling itself SN_BLACKMETA took credit for part of the October 8 attack, which included a distributed denial of service (DDoS) operation that rendered the Internet Archive’s website unusable. SN_BLACKMETA had previously claimed credit for a DDoS attack against the archive in May.

The security news outlet Bleeping Computer reported that a separate attacker was responsible for another attack on the archive that occurred at the same time: a data breach that resulted in the theft of 31 million user credentials, including email addresses, screen names, and Bcrypt-hashed passwords.

After the most recent attack, SN_BLACKMETA claimed that they targeted the Internet Archive because it “belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of ‘Israel.'”

Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive is a nonprofit based in San Francisco that provides access to historic web pages, digitized books, and a variety of other media that it has uploaded through its partnerships with hundreds of physical libraries and other partners.

Its unparalleled collection currently contains 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, and 1 million software programs.

While it receives some federal funding from the National Science Foundation and a Federal Communications Commission program that provides resources to schools and libraries, much of the Internet Archive’s operating budget comes from philanthropic donors.

After the Internet Archive announced the restoration of parts of the website on October 21, hackers appeared to still have access to parts of the organization’s systems. They sent messages to some users through the archive’s Zendesk IT support system in which they said the nonprofit “has still not done the due diligence or rotating many of the API keys that were exposed in their gitlab secrets,” referring to the GitLab software platform.

A hacker who claimed responsibility for the data breach told Bleeping Computer that the Internet Archive had left a GitLab configuration file exposed on one of its development servers, which contained authentication tokens that allowed the attacker to download the organization’s source code.