- Archive.today blacklisted, 695,000 Wikipedia links likely to be affected
- The website has been linked to a DDoS attack targeting a blogger
- Wikipedia argues Archive.today also changed site content, rendering 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.
AWikipedia thread outlined how Archive.today allegedly inserted malicious JavaScript code to use visitors’ browsers in a DDoS attack against a third party.
Wikipedia explained that user safety outweighs convenience, and that a site that uses visitors for DDoS attacks is “untrustworthy.”
Wikipedia has blacklisted Archive.today
Malicious JavaScript embedded in Archive.today’s 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, this makes a request to the search function of my blog using a random string, ensuring the response cannot be cached and thus consumes resources,” Patokallio wrote.
The DDoS attacks began after the Archive.today maintainer demanded that Patokallio remove a 2023 blog post investigating the site’s ownership.
A subpoena was also reportedly issues to domain registrar Tucows for information on Archive.today’s operator.
As for Wikipedia, it means that editors will need to replace Archive.today links with alternatives such as Internet Archive or Wayback Machine, or use non-archived sources if possible. More broadly, it’s 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 towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack,” the thread explains in relation to the most recent Archive.today ban.
The blacklisting is also proof that relying on third-party services poses a risk by introducing a non-controllable variable. Wikipedia argues that the site’s operated have also “altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”
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