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The Internet Archive is back online after being hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks last week. Users can now access the 916 billion web pages already saved by the website, but adding new pages is still unavailable, says founder Brewster Kahle.
"The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine resumed in a provisional, read-only manner," he tweeted. "Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again."
Last week, a hacking group breached the website, stole its data, and put up a pop-up that said: "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 is a website users visit to check if their data was leaked in a cyberattack. Its creator, Troy Hunt, confirmed the Internet Archive breach and said the hackers had sent him 6.4GB of data stolen from 31 million user accounts, including email addresses, usernames, and hashed passwords. According to Kahle, the web data hosted by the site is "safe."
The @Sn_darkmeta X account took responsibility for the attack and, in a now-deleted tweet, said they did it in protest of the US government's support for Israel. "They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of Israel."
@Sn_darkmeta also claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on the Internet Archive in May.