Internet Archive reels from 'catastrophic' cyberattack, data breach

DDoS attacks are not hacks. They just limit or prevent the servers from functioning normally. Anyone can pay the BitCoin and buy a DDoS attack. To prevent it, you need to pay outfits like Cloudflare for protection. NGOs with small budgets may find this tougher. There are free alternative options using distributed systems, but they are not widely used.

If data is properly encrypted, it doesn't matter if it gets nicked. It is secure and has no value on the dark web.

Attacking websites of public utility unassociated with governments is an act of terrorism, vandalism, greed or stupidity that damages any cause the hackers seek to promote. If you want to make a political statement online, do a bit more research first.

The IA's logins may have been related to their unwise Controlled Digital Lending service which recently took a pasting in the US courts:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/05/appeals_court_internet_archive_copyright/

Copying to an Image viewer and saving, using 'Save As, Web Page, Complete' in your browser and the 'Print Screen' key are the easiest ways of capturing a webpage/screen. Other assorted solutions are available, but YouTube have just cracked down on streaming capture.

The vast majority of people don't need any login to archive.org. I've been using it 20+ yrs and never had a login. It captures my websites just by requesting it to look every 6 months or so.

Sadly, it doesn't capture DB-driven websites very well, if at all. A number of great websites disappeared when the owner took them down and the thousands of non-static web pages were lost.

I used archive.org earlier this week without any issues.

Just checked a minute ago and is was down still.

Around 2018, I decided that capturing webpages as they were AT-THE-TIME for certain statements was something I needed, so Wallabag was setup. https://wallabag.org/ is F/LOSS, for those that care. Great way to have a local copy of webpages that might disappear. For example, news websites often expire articles much faster than we'd like (cough ... JT!).