What could the first online magazine have possibly looked like? Where can you find archives of ancient chatrooms or websites before revision?
Look no further than the “Wayback Machine,” brought to you by the Internet Archive. A nonprofit organization focused on preserving digital content, the online service offers free access to a vast digital library of books, videos, websites, and software, including the beautiful Feed Magazine, one of the Internet’s earliest online magazines.
The Internet Archive, founded in 1996, is a service that provides universal access to all of the internet’s history, acting as a digital time capsule and preserving information that could have been lost to the void due to the rapid pace of technological change. It homes 28+ years of internet history and contains over 800 billion websites. As a completely free service (similar to a physical library), the Internet Archive runs on a shoestring budget, relying on donations from its users and foundations like the Democracy Fund and Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Around Oct. 9, 2024, news surfaced of a data breach enacted on the website due to a cyberattack. The attack targeted the Internet Archive’s internal infrastructure and caused significant disruptions to its services.
“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!”
This message appeared as a JavaScript alert on the site, informing users of the breach and directing them to “Have I Been Pwned,” a service where users can input their information and check if it has been involved in a data breach. The hacking was administered by the anonymous group, SN_BlackMeta, thought to originate in Russia.
The Internet Archive has been back up and running since around Oct. 15, just under two weeks after the initial hacking that downed the system and left users with a blank screen.
A similar hacking happened in July 2024 by SiegedSec, a self-described group of “Gay Furry Hackers,” who attempted to hack into the Heritage Foundation, also known as Project 2025, a headlining aspect of the Republican Party’s campaign in the 2024 election.
While these gay furry hackers’ destruction ended at doxxing federal employees at the Heritage Foundation, they called out the goals of Project 2025, arguing it’s “an authoritarian Christian nationalist plan to reform the United States government.”
The SN_BlackMeta Internet Archive hackers, however, attacked a nonprofit online library, with no agenda, just because they could. This aforementioned library, home to billions of records of online human history, hung in the balance because some anonymous vandals thought it would be cool. And they did it less than a month before, arguably, one of America’s most important elections.
Hackers, like it or not, have a significant influence over American politics and history. In 2020, the appropriately-named hacking group “Anonymous” released over 200 GB of internal U.S. law enforcement data in light of the ongoing fight against police brutality. SiegedSec once tried to take down a political plan expected to significantly impact them in particular, due to its homophobic and transphobic rhetoric. The Internet Archive menaces did it for fun. In a world where hacking can be used to engage in political unrest, it seems as if they aren’t doing it for the right cause. Misinformation can be dangerous during election periods; it spreads quickly, often going unchecked and uncorrected. Why hack a library? Why attempt to block information from reaching users, especially in critical times when education is incredibly important to the future of our country?
It feels like they don’t know what they are doing; this hacking was random, unnecessary, and harmful to public information access. By disrupting a resource that plays a significant role in historical preservation, and without any discernible message or intent, these hackers emphasize the vulnerability of nonprofit organizations such as the Internet Archive in an age where motives could be as simple as proving a capability.
This post was originally published on here
