The Internet Archive is back as a readable service after the cyber attack

The Internet Archive is back online in a read-only state after a cyber attack took down the Digital Library and Wayback Machine last week. A data breach and DDoS attack kicked the site offline on October 9, a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records was also stolen in recent weeks.

The Internet Archive is now back online in “temporary, read-only mode,” according to founder Brewster Kahle. “It is safe to resume but further maintenance may be required, in which case it will be suspended again.”

While you can access the Wayback Machine to search the 916 billion web pages archived over time, you cannot currently capture an existing web page in the archive. Kahle and the team have been slowly restoring Archive.org services in recent days, including bringing back the team's email accounts and its crawlers for the National Libraries. The services are taken offline so that Internet Archive staff can test and harden them against future attacks

A pop-up from an alleged hacker claimed the archive had suffered a “catastrophic security breach” last week, before Have I Been Pound confirmed the data had been stolen. The theft included email addresses, screen names, hashed passwords and other internal data for 31 million unique email accounts.

The Internet Archive outage came weeks after Google began adding links to archived websites to the Wayback Machine. Google removed links to its own cached pages earlier this year, so linking the Wayback Machine to Google search results is an effective way to access older versions of linked websites or archived pages.