Internet Archive faces major data breach, exposing 31 million accounts

Internet Archive data breach

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library known for archiving vast amounts of web content, is reportedly come under attack with a significant data breach. According to a report by The Verge, personal information of 31 million user accounts has been compromised.

The report states that a pop up came up on the site which suggested user data of 31 million accounts has been leaked. “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!”, read the pop up.

HIPB is “Have I Been Pwned” — a platform where you can check whether your data has been part of any security breaches. HIBP also confirmed that 54% of the accounts were already a part of previous security breaches.

The latest security breach was confirmed by Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive. “DDOS attack–fended off for now; defacement of our website via JS library; breach of usernames/email/salted-encrypted passwords,” he said in a post on X. He also revealed that Internet Archive had “disabled the JS library, scrubbing systems, upgrading security.”
Moneycontrol tried to access Internet Archive but the portal doesn’t open nor is it showing any error.

The report by The Verge also revealed that n account on X called SN_Blackmeta took responsibility for the attack. The account also suggested that another attack was being planned.