- Archive.today blacklisted, 695,000 Wikipedia links likely to be affected
- Website has been linked to a DDoS attack targeting a blogger
- Wikipedia claims that Archive.today also altered 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 detailed 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 “untrustworthy.”
Wikipedia blacklisted Archive.today
Malicious JavaScript code embedded in Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page caused users’ browsers to send repeated requests to Jani Patokallio’s blog.
“Every 300 milliseconds, while 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 asked Patokallio to remove a blog post from 2023 investigating the site’s ownership.
A subpoena was also reportedly issued to domain registrar Tucows seeking information about the operator Archive.today.
As for Wikipedia, this means that editors will have to replace Archive.today links with alternatives such as the Internet Archive or Wayback Machine, or use non-archived sources where possible. More broadly, this is not the first time that 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 launch a DDoS attack,” the thread explains about Archive.today’s latest ban.
The blacklist is also proof that using third-party services poses a risk by introducing an uncontrollable variable. Wikipedia claims that the site’s operators also “altered the content of archived pages, making them unreliable.”
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