What we know about the Internet Archive cyber attack
The Internet Archive is one of the most important computer technological projects ever. Its existence exemplifies the hacker ethos: knowledge should be free. The Internet Archive is a way to preserve the world’s vast knowledge and culture. The late Aaron Swartz died for these ideals.
Our corporate overlords want to litigate the Internet Archive to oblivion.
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A true hacker would want to help the Internet Archive. A true hacker would want to liberate all the corporately gate kept media and put it on the Archive for everyone to enjoy.
The people who cyber attacked the Archive aren’t hackers… They’re cyber threat actors.
Here’s what we know about the attack that these assholes conducted. Thank you to cybersecurity researcher Scott Helme for sharing this.
A threat actor breached the Archive’s authentication database, a file named “ia_users.sql”. This database includes credentials of people who maintain the Internet Archive, including email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and various other sensitive data. The database includes 31 million email addresses, as the threat actor alluded to in their JavaScript alert as a part of their vandalism of the website:
HIBP is Have I Been Pwned, by the way. It’s a service for people to learn about data breaches that have impacted them. I recommend that you use it.
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle tweeted an update on October 9th:
“What we know: DDOS attacked-fended off for now; defacement of our website via JS library; breach of usernames/email/salted-encrypted passwords,” reads a first status update tweeted last night.
What we’ve done: Disabled the JS library, scrubbing systems, upgrading security.”
The initial breach of the Internet Archive’s database and JavaScript likely occurred on September 28th, as that’s the timestamp of the most recent record.
From October 9th and 10th, DDoS attacks to the site have continued. SN_Blackmeta on Twitter claim to be behind the continuing DDoS attacks. Did they conduct the initial breach as well?
And what I want to know is, is this financially motivated cybercrime, or some very twisted hacktivism? I would be slightly less angry if it was the former. The latter would enrage me. That’s your political motive, Blackmeta? To keep knowledge and culture away from the people? Our corporate overlords don’t care about preserving it. We need to pirate and archive media because our corporate overlords don’t try to preserve it at all. Look to what corporations like Time Warner have been doing as one of countless many examples.
Further reading:
The Internet Archive is under attack, with a breach revealing info for 31 million accounts, The Verge, Wes Davis
Internet Archive hacked, data breach impacts 31 million users, BleepingComputer, Lawrence Abrams
What do you think, dear readers?
