By Jeremy Ray Jewell

The Internet Archive’s struggles highlight the challenges faced by nonprofit organizations operating in a digital world dominated by commercial and geopolitical interests.

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving digital history, is currently facing a series of severe disruptions. Over the past few weeks, it has been the target of multiple hacking incidents, legal battles, and aggressive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These issues have led to intermittent downtime and limited functionality — and that puts the future of digital preservation at risk.

Founded in 1996 by digital librarian Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive aims to provide “universal access to all knowledge.” Its “Wayback Machine” has been archiving snapshots of web pages (including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images) for nearly three decades. Today, it hosts over 900 billion web pages, amounting to almost 100 petabytes of data. Users can revisit the early days of the internet, from the humble beginnings of today’s tech giants to the quirky personal websites of Geocities. Reflecting the web’s previously diverse past, this is a crucial reminder in our age of internet monopolies that things can be different. The Internet Archive also provides access to a vast collection of videos, audio, and books, many pre-internet. Add a variety of software to that, and it is clear to see why many view it as an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, and the general public. However, recent incidents have threatened the security and functionality of this truly essential service.

The first major sign of trouble surfaced on September 30, 2024, when the data breach website “Have I Been Pwned” (HIBP) reported that the Internet Archive had been compromised. The hack was confirmed on October 5 and the Archive notified on October 6. By October 8, the public was informed that 31 million email addresses, usernames, and password hashes had been exposed. Security researcher Troy Hunt, founder of HIBP, clarified the extent of the compromised data: authentication tokens, consisting of screen names, password update timestamps, and Bcrypt-hashed password digests.

On October 9, attackers defaced the Internet Archive’s website by placing a JavaScript pop-up alert warning visitors about the breach. The alert read, “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 suggested that the attackers had gotten access to the platform’s codebase, which raised concerns about the security and integrity of the Archive’s data. There is no confirmation that hackers actually tampered with the historical web data, but the potential threat to digital preservation is significant.

The situation escalated with a series of DDoS attacks. On October 8, Brewster Kahle confirmed that the invaders had overwhelmed the Archive’s servers, eventually forcing the platform offline. Russian hacker group SN_BlackMeta claimed responsibility for these assaults, citing political motives related to pro-Palestinian causes and expressing anti-US and anti-Israeli sentiments. The group announced their intention to continue disrupting the Archive, claiming, “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.” The charges have no merit: the Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization with no political affiliations. In a recent post on X, SN_BlackMeta similarly declared, “contrary to popular belief, we do not work and we are not associated to [sic] any government agency”.

Attacking the world’s single most important source of historical information that houses the internet’s history is obviously an absurd way to make a point about Israel-Palestine. For one thing, evidence of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians can be found on the Internet Archive. And, as we all know, conscription-age, politically passionate, tech-savvy Russian rebels are deeply concerned about Palestine at the moment. We need only recall Nazi book burnings and Stalinist purges of opponents from the historical record to see that we have been here before — acts of erasing history before rewriting it. When we consider the threats presented by AI, particularly regarding how it can alter the historical record to make it more palatable to its users, the current danger presented by such attacks on the most important records collection of the last 30 years is evident. If you wanted to harm a free people, you would first attack its freedom of information. Russia has already proven itself apt at undercutting credibility in our understanding of current affairs.

As of October 14, the Archive has managed to restore partial functionality, allowing users to access the Wayback Machine in a “provisional, read-only manner.” Other services remain offline. Kahle stated that additional maintenance might require further suspensions, adding that the organization is “being cautious and prioritizing keeping data safe at the expense of service availability.”

The recent security challenges are not the only concern. The Internet Archive also faces legal challenges stemming from its “Open Library” project, co-founded by Kahle and the late Aaron Swartz (known for his advocacy of open access to information and his mysterious “suicide” while facing federal charges for downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR through MIT’s network). This project digitizes physical books in order to facilitate the lending of digital copies, adhering to a one-to-one ownership model. However, several major publishers sued the Archive, claiming that this practice constituted copyright infringement. The lawsuit ended in favor of the publishers. Not only does the Archive now face potential damages exceeding $600 million; the organization was forced to delete 500,000 digital books, highlighting an ongoing tension between digital preservation and copyright law.

This legal defeat has added to the strain on the Archive’s finances, threatening the sustainability of one of its core projects. A nonprofit, the Internet Archive operates on limited resources, and the convergence of legal and security crises has placed considerable pressure on its future viability. The recent breaches and attacks underscore the fragility of digital preservation. If attackers can erase or tamper with archived content, the loss to historical records is incalculable. The only other entity with a comparable digital archive is Google, which has stopped maintaining its own cached search results. It now redirects users to the Wayback Machine. At this point, losing the Internet Archive would mean erasing a crucial part of the web’s history, with far-reaching consequences for researchers, historians, and the public.

The Internet Archive’s struggles highlight the challenges faced by nonprofit organizations operating in a digital world dominated by commercial and geopolitical interests. Despite its invaluable service, the Archive has always had to operate on limited financial resources. Now, with legal and security crises converging, its future is more uncertain than ever. What began as a visionary project to create a “digital library” has now morphed into a battleground for contentious issues touching on privacy, intellectual property, and digital preservation. The outcome of these battles will have significant implications for how we remember the past in an increasingly “virtual” world.

The challenge is clear: preserving digital history is more critical than ever. If the Internet Archive cannot weather this storm, it will signal the beginning of an Orwellian world, where the internet’s past can be manipulated, revised, or erased, leaving future generations with a distorted or incomplete understanding of history. There are at least two parties who share responsibility for tooling up chaos here. And chances are good that these threats to the preservation of our historical record are on track to grow in the near future. On the one hand, there are the “unaffiliated” Russian hacktivists who are interested in turning the world’s attention away from atrocities in Ukraine and brewing coups in Moldova. On the other hand, large US-based publishers like Wiley have already demonstrated their willingness to transgress norms of academic rigor in order to facilitate collaboration with the informational dictates of totalitarian governments.

Our reboot-saturated market for nostalgia demands that history be appealing, a yen exploited by various ideologies who are hellbent on airbrushing the past for the sake of maintaining or taking power. That urge to remake the past for the sake of pleasing the present makes us increasingly vulnerable to those interested in trashing the historical record. For the sake of a reality-based future, an accurate past must be militantly defended.

Jeremy Ray Jewell writes on class and cultural transmission. He has an MA in history of ideas from Birkbeck College, University of London, and a BA in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Boston. His website is www.jeremyrayjewell.com.