Internet Archive Suffers from “Catastrophic” Security Breach, Impacting 31 Million Users

[Tsing]

The Internet Archive, the digital library best known for providing free access to websites, apps, music, printed materials, and other archived content as part of its mission in providing "universal access to all knowledge," has begun telling people to change their passwords after confirming that it has suffered from a security breach, one that is being described as "catastrophic," with a threat actor having stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records.

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[Zarathustra]

I didn't even realize the Internet Archive had user accounts that could be compromized.

Only thing I've ever used it for was the wayback machine to find old articles that have gone offline

I'm genuinely curious. What are the accounts for?

I guess my question is, did they just steal the logins, or did they also inject malware into the archived content?

 

[MadMummy76]

I didn't even realize the Internet Archive had user accounts that could be compromized.

Those were my first thoughts as well. The scraping and archiving is done automatically, and you can access the archives without an account, so what is it for?