The Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, has been battling a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack since Sunday. The attack has caused intermittent outages and limited access to the Wayback Machine, a tool that archives web pages. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, said in a blog post, “Thankfully the collections are safe, but we are sorry that the denial-of-service attack has knocked us offline intermittently during these last three days. With the support from others and the hard work of staff, we are hardening our defenses to provide more reliable access to our library. What is new is this attack has been sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean.” The attack involves bombarding the site with tens of thousands of fake information requests per second. As of Wednesday, the source of the attack was unknown and efforts to mitigate its impact were ongoing.
Internet Archive battles sustained attack
This attack comes as the Internet Archive faces legal battles with book publishers and record labels over alleged copyright infringement. In March 2023, a federal judge ruled that the archive does not have a fair use right to lend digital copies of purchased print books, potentially exposing it to hundreds of millions in damages. “If our patrons around the globe think this latest situation is upsetting, then they should be very worried about what the publishing and recording industries have in mind,”
Kahle warned. “I think they are trying to destroy this library entirely and hobble all libraries everywhere.”
An anonymous group called SN_Blackmeta, which appears to oppose US and Israeli interests, has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks. The motivation behind their actions is unclear. Access to parts of the Wayback Machine remained unstable as of Wednesday afternoon.
