The Internet Archive is back online today in a read-only state after a cyberattack last week brought down the digital library and WaybackMachine services. A data breach and DDoS attack took the site offline on October 9, and its user verification database containing 31 million unique records was stolen in recent weeks.
According to founder Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is now back online in a "temporary, read-only mode." "Safe to resume, but further maintenance may be required, in which case it will be suspended again.
While you can access WaybackMachine to search the 916 billion archived web pages, you can't currently crawl existing web pages into the archive. In recent days, Kahle and his team have been gradually restoring Archive.org services, including restoring the team's email accounts and crawlers. With services offline, Internet Archive staff can inspect and harden them against future attacks.
Before HaveIBeenPwned confirmed that the data had been stolen, a pop-up claiming to be a hacker claimed that the archive suffered a "catastrophic security breach" last week. The stolen content included email addresses, screen names, hashed passwords and other internal data for 31 million unique email accounts.
Just weeks before the Internet Archive outage, Google started adding links to archived websites in Wayback Machine. Google removed its own cached page links earlier this year, so linking WaybackMachine in Google search results is a useful way to access older versions of your site or archived pages.