Hundreds of thousands of links: Wikipedia bans Archive.today after cyberattack

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The news is causing a stir in the online encyclopedia's community: The English-language Wikipedia has decided to block the archiving service Archive.today and all associated domains such as archive.is and archive.ph with immediate effect. On the surface, this looks like a technical dispute over linking sources. However, a closer look reveals the move to be a genuine digital scandal involving revenge campaigns, manipulated historical records, and the misuse of user hardware for cyberattacks.

The background to the decision is a conflict between the operator of Archive.today and the blogger Jani Patokallio. In his web journal Gyrovague.com, he reported on the veiled identity of the masterminds behind the archiving service, discussing connections to Russia and various pseudonyms such as “Denis Petrov” or “Masha Rabinovich.” However, the reaction of the Archive.today operator went beyond any usual dispute.

Hijacked browsers for the revenge campaign

Wikipedia editors discovered that Archive.today was injecting malicious code into its visitors' pages. Through the service's Captcha queries, users' computing power was hijacked to launch a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack against Patokallio's blog. Such actions fundamentally violate the Wikimedia Foundation's guidelines. They do not want to send their readers to websites that misuse their computers for attacks.

But the accusations are even more serious: In the course of internal investigations, Wikipedia authors discovered that Archive.today had apparently corrupted the integrity of its snapshots. Evidence suggests that the operator deliberately altered content on archived pages to discredit Patokallio. For example, in archived blog posts, the name of another person was replaced with the name of the hated blogger.

For an online encyclopedia, whose core principle is verifiability and substantiation through immutable sources, such events represent the worst-case scenario. If an archiving service begins to rewrite history at its own discretion, it loses its reason for existence as a reference source.

Manipulation shakes Wikipedia's pillars

In internal discussions, Wikipedia editors expressed shock. An archive that is supposed to function as a neutral witness should not be used as a weapon in personal feuds. Proponents of Archive.today argued, however, that the service is indispensable due to its ability to bypass paywalls. But this argument no longer held sway in light of the security risks and proven manipulations. The community concluded that the reliability of sources takes precedence over the convenience of bypassing paywalls.

The scale of the undertaking is enormous. Estimates suggest that more than 695,000 links pointing to Archive.today are found on around 400,000 Wikipedia pages. These are now to be successively removed or replaced with safer alternatives such as the Internet Archive (archive.org) or Ghostarchive. Editors received the appeal to manually check links and, if the original source is still online, to completely delete the archive link or switch to reputable providers. The Wikipedians explicitly emphasize that the renowned Internet Archive, based in the USA, has no connection to the incidents surrounding Archive.today.

Threats and the search for alternatives

The case also sheds light on the opaque structures behind many “grey area services” on the internet. For years, Archive.today was considered a useful tool for journalists and fact-checkers. However, the identity of its operators always remained in the dark. Even the FBI reportedly tried to force information about the masterminds via the registrar Tucows – so far unsuccessfully.

The now-revealed threats against Patokallio, which according to reports even included the creation of fake dating profiles and AI-generated pornography under his name, underscore the aggressive behavior of the site's operators.

For Archive.today, the ban from the Wikipedia universe means a severe loss of reputation. The online encyclopedia itself sees the intervention as a painful but necessary cleansing process. The Wikimedia Foundation stated a few days ago that it would also intervene directly if the volunteer editors could not reach an agreement. It considered user safety to be immediately threatened by the infected Captcha pages. Could this incident now be the birth of its own Wikimedia archiving service? Blogger Patokallio, at least, hopes for exactly that, as he explained to Ars Technica.

(nie)