We were first exposed to the Internet Archive ages ago through their service the Wayback Machine, which archives websites. It’s a pretty cool service and really interesting to see old 00’s websites as well as see how web pages for certain sites evolved over time.
From an offensive cyber security and OSINT perspective, the Wayback Machine provides some interesting finds such as old links that still work.
The Internet Archive also has Open Library which is a web-based public library. Oddly enough, one of the legal cases we helped out in brought us to a book review on Open Library. Sadly the Internet Archive lost a court case against some major publishers regarding Open Library [Source: The Verge ]
The Internet Archive offers so much for so many people beyond what we mentioned above. If you like art, old time radio, old arcade games, old 80s malware, old movies, and news archives, this place is for you. The Internet Archive is a bastion of history, art, culture, and education. And right now, as of October 17th 2024, you can’t access anything except a provisional version of the Wayback Machine.
Why?
On October 8th a “hacktivist” group claimed responsibility for launching a cyber attack against the Internet Archive. One report was of a data breach affecting 31 million users, which the bad actor doesn’t claim they did. The other incident was a DDoS attack knocking the organization offline, which they owned up to [Souce: TechCrunch ]. The organization shutdown their services to safeguard their data.
Why did this group launch the DDoS attack? Politics.
A politically driven attack against a library that has little-to-nothing to do with politics.
We brought up this problem in one of the interviews on our series Bsquared Intel’s Listening Post. The discussion we had was about our fears pertaining to cyber attacks and technology in general. One of ours was the loss of digital platforms like the Internet Archive and social media.
Little by little we lose knowledge daily because of link rot. This is where web sites either shutter, get bought out, or redesigned. Because of this, information that’s of historical, cultural, or educational value is either wiped out for good, or exists but no longer public, or buried in some deep recess of a website. When you click a link that’s broken on a website, that’s link rot.
On a grander scale, loss of digital platforms wipe out valuable history and culture. For us this also means evidence is destroyed.
We’re living in an age where more and more of what we have access to, or “own”, isn’t ours. Steaming services like Spotify and Netflix currently have no incentive to archive audio or video. Neither does Amazon with digital books, music, or movies.
This is why we need to protect organizations like the Internet Archive that help preserve digital culture and preserve physical media that will deteriorate over time. Physical media is also important to have as a backup should it’s digital counterpart disappear.
We wanted to bring your attention to the Internet Archive incident in order to highlight the impact a cyber attack has on all of us that doesn’t include the usual suspects of stolen passwords and credit card data.
We look forward to when the archive is fully back up and running.
How would you solve the problem of archiving digital and physical media? Share your thoughts with us in the contact form below.
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