- Archive.today blacklisted, 695,000 Wikipedia links likely to be affected
- The 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.
The 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 security outweighs convenience and that a website 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 sends a request to the search function on my blog using a random string, ensuring that 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 issued to domain registrar Tucows to obtain information about Archive.today’s operator.
As for Wikipedia, this means editors will have to replace Archive.today links with alternatives such as the Internet Archive or the 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 site that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack,” explains the thread in regards to the recent Archive.today ban.
The blacklist is also proof that reliance on third-party services poses a risk by introducing an uncontrollable variable. Wikipedia claims that the site’s operators have also “altered the content of archived pages, making it unreliable.”
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, video unboxings, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
