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The Internet Archive—the online repository of, well, pretty much everything—is under attack. It's been hit by a series of DDOSes that have rendered the site essentially unusable since Wednesday, with the non-profit's engineers scrambling to fend off the assault, upgrade security, and keep users informed all at the same time.
None of which, alarmingly, is the worst part. If you try to go to the site at time of writing, you'll just find an error page, but visitors yesterday were greeted by a pop-up 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!"
HIBP means Have I Been Pwned, a site you can use to check if your emails and passwords have been leaked in any of the data breaches that happen with disconcerting regularity online. In other words: The Archive's attackers are claiming to have nicked the deets for around 31 million accounts as part of their campaign, a breach which has since been confirmed by Archive founder Brewster Kale and HIBP's Troy Hunt (via Bleeping Computer).
"What we know:" wrote Kale earlier today, "DDOS attack–fended off for now; defacement of our website via JS library; breach of usernames/email/salted-encrypted passwords." The bad news is that you have an Internet Archive account, your username and email could well have been captured by the site's attackers.
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None of which, alarmingly, is the worst part. If you try to go to the site at time of writing, you'll just find an error page, but visitors yesterday were greeted by a pop-up 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!"
HIBP means Have I Been Pwned, a site you can use to check if your emails and passwords have been leaked in any of the data breaches that happen with disconcerting regularity online. In other words: The Archive's attackers are claiming to have nicked the deets for around 31 million accounts as part of their campaign, a breach which has since been confirmed by Archive founder Brewster Kale and HIBP's Troy Hunt (via Bleeping Computer).
"What we know:" wrote Kale earlier today, "DDOS attack–fended off for now; defacement of our website via JS library; breach of usernames/email/salted-encrypted passwords." The bad news is that you have an Internet Archive account, your username and email could well have been captured by the site's attackers.
Change your passwords: Attackers claim a 'catastrophic security breach' of the Internet Archive, with 31 million emails and hashed passwords captured
"See 31 million of you on HIBP!"
