The Internet Archive, including its Wayback Machine web archive, is facing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which has disrupted its services for over three days now.
“The collections are safe, though service remains inconsistent,” the library staff said in a blog post published May 28. They added that attackers have bombarded the Internet Archive's servers with a barrage of fake information requests, exceeding tens of thousands per second.
Though the source of the attack is still unknown, Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, has called it “sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean.”
Kahle assured that the Archives’ collections are safe but the attack has knocked them offline intermittently for the 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,” Kahle added.
Several cyberattacks targeting public libraries have been reported in the last few months. Last October, Russia-backed Rhysida ransomware attack crippled British Library's online services, taking their website offline for a month and compromising user data.
The Berlin Natural History Museum was also hit by a cyberattack that same month. Attackers stole and published visitor and business partner’s data during the attack and published it in December.
Experts believe the attack on libraries has gone up as attackers are realizing that they are easy targets with under-resourced technical teams and poor security posture.
A review of the British Library cyberattack, published in March, attributed the attack to outdated legacy systems, complex tech infrastructure, lack of multi-factor authentication, and reliance on outsourced IT for the security breach.
Founded in 1996, Internet Archive offers several online services such as Wayback Machine, Software Archive, Open Content Alliance, and Scanning Services, which are used by students, researchers, governments, and even private firms.
The non-profit employs 150 people and has generated over $150 million in revenue in the last 10 years, a major share of which comes from donations.
Its most popular platform Wayback Machine, which is a digital archive of 866 billion web pages, also serves as a large-scale data source for researchers.