Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

It’s incredibly sad to see threat actors attack something as altruistic as an internet library. Truly demoralizing to see such degeneracy.

There are many state actors that attack targets of opportunity just to cause chaos and asymmetric financial costs.

Seems like the actor did it only for the street credit and the second breach is only a reminder that IA didn’t properly fixed it after the first breach.

Could be worse.

When there are plenty of people who are steeped in the dogma of Imaginary Property, and whose lives depend on it, it's not too surprising.

Blame bad leadership.

A different framing is: be grateful that it's these types of people breaching IA and being vocal about it & asking IA to fix their systems. Others might just nuke them, or subtly alter content, or do whatever else bad thing you can think of.

They're providing a public service by pointing out that a massive organization controlling a lot of PII doesn't care about security at all.

Is there a reason to blame the victim, rather than the attackers?

I’m asking seriously - did IA do shitty things that make them a worthy cause for politically/ideologically motivated hacking?

I imagine they're referring to the fact that the leadership showed extremely bad judgement in deciding to pick a battle with the major publishing companies that everyone knew they would lose before it even began [0].

I don't think that justifies blaming the victim here, and from what I can see the attacker doesn't seem to be motivated by anything other than funsies, but I absolutely lost a lot of faith in their leadership when they pulled the NEL nonsense. The IA is too valuable for them to act like a young activist org—there's too much for us to lose at this point. They need to hold the ground they've won and leave the activism to other organizations.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-loses-hachette-...

Not defending attacker, because I see IA as common good. That said one of the messages from this particular instance reads almost as if they were trying to help by pointing out issues that IA clearly missed:

"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."

I am starting to wonder if the chorus of 'maybe one org should not be responsible for all this; it is genuinely too important' has a point.

anything with tons of traffic going to it is a target. it has nothing to do with what the entity does, more with what potential reach it has. criminal behaviour is what it is. people pulling loads of visitors need to properly secure their shit, to prevent their their customers becoming their victims.

> there's too much for us to lose at this point

Feeling entitled?

FYI: "Money" is imaginary property. Not sure you want to call people supporting "imaginary property" dogmatic. It's what our society is built on.

Only if you don't care about history

"Us" means all of humankind for hopefully many generations to come. It's not about my personal entitlement, it's that the IA serves a vital role for humanity (one which they fought hard to make permissible).

Money is not imaginary. You can touch and interact with it.

That's like saying movies aren't imaginary either because there's blu-rays. Even if we take that point at face value though, the vast majority of money is imaginary, only existing on ledgers. When the fed "prints money", it's just adjusting an entry on a database somewhere.

If it's so important to us, perhaps we should support it then?

The discussion around IA nowadays seems a lot like random users ranting at open source maintainers in Github issues.

Books are not part of history?

Was the hacker motivated by IP? The article appears to say no.

It's paper and ink that we've given a perceived value to.

> I am starting to wonder if the chorus of 'maybe one org should not be responsible for all this; it is genuinely too important' has a point.

I agree this probably needs to be run more professionally but I think the "chorus" is missing the key fact that no one has stepped up to pay for or build an alternate and driving this one to insolvency just leaves us poorer.

I/P not IP, as in Israel/Palestine.

The vast majority of money is not physical, by likely 2 orders of magnitude, so you cannot touch it. It's a value in a ledger that can be moved electronically (or copied by hand).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

I think this is why I am kinda debating what personally I can do about it ( in a reasonably efficient way ). And I admit I am on the fence. I try to donate funds to some worthy causes ( like EFF ) every so often and IA might be getting some offers of help now that is in the spotlight ( and can I reasonably compare to someone steeped in the subject? likely no ).

I do advocate for some variant of digital prepping in my social circle, but the response has been similar to my talk about privacy. The ones that do care, have already taken steps or are in the process of some sort of solution for their use-case. Those people do not need convincing or even much help.. they mostly simply know what they want and/or need.

As for a more systemic solution.. I honestly don't know. HN itself seems pretty divided and I can absolutely understand why.

All that said, I think I agree with you. There is no real alternative now so IA needs our support at the very least until we can figure out how to preserve what was already gathered. I said the following on this forum before. Wikipedia is not hurting for money, but IA, being in legal crosshairs and whatnot, likely will.

IA is sooooo important we can't even undo the clusterfuck that is the disney-bought copyright system.

The black woman on the bus refusing to give up her seat was also 100% legally obviously in the wrong. IA lost not because what they were doing was morally wrong, but because each and every one of us continually refuses to agitate for the kind of change that would benefit the world.

If you want the public to have a library, you must enshrine that library's right to exist and operate in law, or it will never survive legal challenges from IP holders. Physical libraries would never be allowed to exist in modern America, not without 100 years of precedence of the first sale doctrine. You can bet your ass disney would have tried to kill such a thing. Freely watch our movies? No chance.