- Archive.today blacklisted, 695,000 Wikipedia links likely affected
- Website has been linked to a DDoS attack targeting a blogger
- Wikipedia maintains that Archive.today also changed the site’s content, making it unreliable
Wikipedia has blacklisted Archive.today and more than 695,000 links will be removed from around 400,000 English-language pages after Archive.today was used to facilitate a DDoS attack.
A Wikipedia thread described how Archive.today allegedly inserted malicious JavaScript code to use visitors’ browsers in a DDoS attack against a third party.
Wikipedia explained that user security trumps convenience and that a site that uses visitors for DDoS attacks is “not trustworthy.”
Wikipedia has blacklisted Archive.today
Malicious JavaScript embedded in the Archive.today CAPTCHA page caused users’ browsers to send repeated requests to Jani Patokallio’s blog.
“Every 300 milliseconds, as long as the CAPTCHA page is open, a request is made to my blog’s search function using a random string, ensuring that the response cannot be cached and therefore consumes resources,” Patokallio wrote.
The DDoS attacks began after the head of Archive.today demanded that Patokallio remove a blog post from 2023 that investigated the site’s ownership.
It was also reported that a subpoena was issued to domain registrar Tucows for information about the operator of Archive.today.
As for Wikipedia, it means that editors will need to replace Archive.today links with alternatives like the Internet Archive or Wayback Machine, or use non-archived sources if possible. More generally, this is not the first time Archive.today has been blacklisted: it was banned in 2013 before being reinstated in 2016.
“There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers to a website that hijacks users’ computers to execute a DDoS attack,” the thread explains in relation to Archive.today’s most recent ban.
Blacklisting is also proof that relying on third-party services poses a risk by introducing an uncontrollable variable. Wikipedia maintains that the site’s operators have also “altered the content of archived pages, rendering them unreliable.”
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