Internet Archive Suffers 'Catastrophic' Breach Impacting 31 Million Users

BleepingComputer's Lawrence Abrams: Internet Archive's 'The Wayback Machine' has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached.

'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!,' reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site. The text 'HIBP' refers to is the Have I Been Pwned data breach notification service created by Troy Hunt, with whom threat actors commonly share stolen data to be added to the service.

Hunt told BleepingComputer that the threat actor shared the Internet Archive's authentication database nine days ago and it is a 6.4GB SQL file named 'ia_users.sql.' The database contains authentication information for registered members, including their email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data. Hunt says there are 31 million unique email addresses in the database, with many subscribed to the HIBP data breach notification service. The data will soon be added to HIBP, allowing users to enter their email and confirm if their data was exposed in this breach.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.