Internet Archive victim of “targeted and malicious” DDoS attacks for three days
Since Sunday, the Internet Archive is target of DDoS attacks that make access more difficult. The operator uses attacks to draw attention to another danger.
(Image: asharkyu/Shutterstock.com)
Since the weekend, the Internet Archive has been the target of "sustained, effective, targeted, adaptable and above all malicious" DDoS attacks. The operator of the Internet project made this public in a blog post and explained that access to the services, including the Wayback Machine, continues to be unreliable. The collections of content held by the Internet Archive are "fortunately" secure, but the persistent waves of access would repeatedly kick the site off the Internet. However, the operator uses the opportunity to point out the legal proceedings that US publishers have brought against the archive. These are much more dangerous.
Not the first attack
The source of the attacks is unknown, according to the blog entry. The company is working on improving its defenses to make access to its own site more reliable. The operator points out that this is not the first attack on the archive in the recent past. Exactly one year ago, the site went offline temporarily because someone triggered an immense number of accesses to the automatically recognized text collection to train an AI text generator. This was repeated several times. This was not a classic DDoS attack, but the consequences were the same. Archive founder Brewster Kahle subsequently asked for more consideration.
While the current attack is likely to pass despite its targeted nature, the archive faces a much greater threat from another direction, according to the blog entry. Reference is made to the legal dispute with US publishers, which is directed against libraries everywhere. The publishers Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House (Bertelsmann) are specifically accusing the archive of deliberately infringing copyright with its Open Library. This involves scanning books, uploading the digital copies to its own servers and offering them on a publicly accessible website. Authors and publishers are not remunerated for these uses. A year ago, the archive was ordered to pay damages.
(mho)