31m users exposed as Wayback Machine suffers data breach

The details of 31 million users have been exposed after Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine suffered a hack.

Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library that offers millions of free books, movies, audio files, and billions of saved web pages in the Wayback Machine that would have been lost or deleted.

An illicit pop-up on the Internet Archive on Wednesday announced that the site had suffered a major data breach.

“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!” users reported seeing on the landing page after the hack.

HIBP, an acronym for Have I Been Pwned, is a tool that confirms if email addresses previously suffered a data breach.

Troy Hunt, HIPB creator, confirmed that the breach was legitimate.

According to Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive founder, the organisation fended off a DDOS attack.

Kahle said the library also disabled the JS library after hackers defaced the website via the portal, scrubbed systems, and upgraded security.

“Will share more as we know it,” Kahle tweeted.

A pop-up on the Wayback Machine urged users to ask publishers to restore access.