The Internet Archive, the nonprofit organization that digitizes and archives materials like web pages, came under attack Wednesday. Several users – including over at The Verge – confronted a pop-up when visiting the site, reading, “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”
Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), a data breach notification site, later confirmed the breach, saying that 31 million unique email addresses and usernames were stolen; so did Brewster Kahle, the self-described digital librarian who founded the Internet Archive in 1996.
Indeed, after what may or may not be a related distributed denial-of-service attack on the service (a hacktivist group claimed responsibility for one but not the other), Kahle on Wednesday night suggested there could be more to come. The organization has “fended off” the DDoS attack “for now,” scrubbed its systems, and upgraded its security, he wrote on X. “Will share more as we know it.”
This post was updated to correct the number of individuals affected by the data breach.
