Wayback Machine back online, days after home entertainment-enabled attacks

Internet Archive, the non-profit digital library, is still in read-only mode while the Wayback Machine’s functionality has been restored. Meanwhile, researchers believe that IoT devices helped to take it down.

The best-known website museum, the Wayback Machine, has finally returned to life, Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle announced on X. The service, which allows access to an archive of over 900 billion websites, was down for several days after hackers breached Internet Archive and continued to pound the service with DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks.

However, the post-attack clean-up is still in progress, and at the time of writing, the Wayback Machine was loading properly roughly four out of five times. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive still greets users with a service availability disclaimer informing them that “other Internet Archive services are temporarily offline.”

Wayback Machine running strong (yippie!).

Still working to bring https://t.co/Hk02WjumkL items & other services online safely.@internetarchive team spirits high, but tired.

undefined Brewster Kahle (@brewster_kahle) October 15, 2024

Last week, an alleged hacktivist group struck down the Internet Archive because, as the perpetrators put it themselves, “they are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA […],” and Washington supports Israel. Attackers did not consider the non-profit nature of the Internet Archive.

However, the hacker attack, impacting 31 million of the services’ users, was not the only problem Kahle and his team had to deal with. According to the real-time network visibility platform Netscout, at least 24 DDoS attacks pounded the Internet Archive.

Researchers claim that the nature of the DDoS attacks points to the involvement of the Mirai botnet. First discovered in 2016, Mirai utilized malware that infects Linux-operated devices and self-propagates to infect other machines.

Interestingly, an infected home entertainment system and IoT (internet of things) product was used to carry out the attack. Researchers said that numerous devices “of a well-known home entertainment and IoT product were involved,” with the top contributing hosts located in Korea, China, and Brazil.