Hacker sends email blast to Internet Archive Zendesk support ticket submitters

9 points brettdav | 5 comments | 20 Oct 24 12:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.692s | source

I received the following email as a response to a long closed support email. I don’t see anything to indicate it isn’t from Internet Archive’s actual Zendesk instance.

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The Internet Archive Team (Internet Archive) Oct 20, 2024, 05:22 CDT

It's dispiriting to see that even after being made aware of the breach 2 weeks ago, IA has still not done the due diligence of rotating many of the API keys that were exposed in their gitlab secrets.

As demonstrated by this message, this includes a Zendesk token with perms to access 800K+ support tickets sent to info@archive.org since 2018.

Whether you were trying to ask a general question, or requesting the removal of your site from the Wayback Machine—your data is now in the hands of some random guy. If not me, it'd be someone else.

Here's hoping that they'll get their shit together now.

1. toomuchtodo ◴[20 Oct 24 13:33 UTC] No.41895265[source]▶
I hope IA has engaged law enforcement.
2. Hashex129542 ◴[20 Oct 24 14:14 UTC] No.41895506[source]▶
I hope they'll comeback soon. They are just major part of the internet.
3. mickelsen ◴[20 Oct 24 21:53 UTC] No.41898789[source]▶
Why are they attacking it so bad? They are a good thing, is this a state actor, are they looking for something or they just don't care?
replies(1): >>41905297 #
4. firefax ◴[21 Oct 24 15:36 UTC] No.41905297[source]▶
>Why are they attacking it so bad?

I can think of many people who don't like a potent OS-INT resource.

An academic once told me a story about how they had to pull out a wayback of a company's privacy policy, because when they called them out for violating it there merely edited the policy to make the behavior ok. (Without changing the "last updated" date)

It's also a potent censorship circumvention tool -- if you aren't willing to block all of IA, then it's a way to access a lot.