This isn't something that commonly known (even judging by comments here) but in the publicly viewable metadata of every upload it contains the uploader's IA account email address. So from a security perspective it's bad but from a privacy perspective a lot of users probably weren't aware of this detail if they've uploaded anything.
If someone wants to upload and never be found out, then they need to use a throwaway address in any case, lest they be providing their "private" address to the administrators of the service without explicitly forbidding further disclosure. If I say something to Alice without demanding that Alice keep it from Bob, then I implicitly don't mind if Alice tells Bob what I said.
Even if your email is public information and even if what is uploaded is public information that doesn't imply that the email address behind the account that uploaded that information should be public.
With ChatGPT, this can be extended to create emails that look very personal - as if someone has followed all of your work and is genuinely interested in what you are up to - with extremely low effort. And people are already doing this, I already get emails like this today.
Should emails be private? I don't know - I personally consider them to be public because I know for a fact mine will eventually be public whether I like it or not. But I am aware AI is out their slurping up every public communication I've ever had, and is likely trying to manipulate me in various ways already today.
There are several ways to look at that.
The organization that I work for considers anything that ties two pieces of information about a person together as private information. That is to say that a person's name is not private and a phone number is not private, but connecting a phone number to a name is private. In one form or another, an email is frequently tied to a name (e.g. the email address is based on their name, or an account record includes both a name and an email address).
Another way is to consider how accessible the information is. There was a lot of information that was not considered as private prior to the widespread adoption of the internet. One issue that I remember popping up in the early 1990's involved property (i.e. land) records. Historically, people had to go to a government office to access them but they were publicly available. Since they were publicly available, some governments made them available online. Once they were available online, the barriers to access were removed (e.g. having to physically visit an office) and the ability to abuse that information was vastly increased. All of a sudden, people started considering something that used to be considered as public information as private information.
For contrast truly unique email aliases for example aren't possible on common services like free Gmail*, only things like self-hosting/certain paid email hosts, which makes less feasible for many. So from a privacy perspective while in an ideal world everyone would be able to freely create entirely unique per-account creds we're mostly stuck with the email implementation.
* One could create entirely separate accounts but it's high friction and IIRC the same phone number (now a requirement) can only be used for 2-3 accounts.
I sadly don't think that's viable.
What might be, in our current world, would be having a mail server/client setup where you can generate random addresses for yourself like Wf1JJUBHLu@domain.com and never re-use an e-mail address, much like with passwords, while being able to see all of the incoming mail in the same place and respond with the corresponding accounts.
Then, when your address gets traded around, it'd be fairly obvious (with some basic bookkeeping, e.g. a text field with purpose/URL for why a certain address was created) who is to blame for it and blocking incoming traffic from somewhere would be trivial as well.
I do have a self-hosted mail server and there are commands to create new accounts pretty easily, I'd just need to figure out the configuration for collecting everything in one place, as well as maybe make a web UI for automating some of the bits. I wonder if there are any off the shelf solutions for this out there.
Yes and no. Both of them. As any powerful tool, email is going to be abused, like any other alternative would be when it will come one day. Those services allowing creation of dynamic email addresses do their job (until they're banned, that's why I'm not mentioning them), however using them isn't automatic and most people don't even know about their existence. What if we then did upgrade email protocols to reflect current needs wrt privacy and modified existing mail servers so that they could create dynamic addresses when asked by a simple flag? Example: I want to subscribe to a service from company XYZ, however I'm not sure how much I can trust them, therefore, when writing an email or filling a web form I can activate the option to create a new address that is tied to the recipient I'll be writing to, and will work as a dedicated proxy for my real address, that is, every mail I send to the recipient using my real address will be actually sent from the new dynamic address, then all replies to the dynamic address will be routed to my real one, but a field in its headers will always contain either a memo by me (example: "signup with XYZ") or the original recipient (example: "info@xyz_trustuswerenotspammers_yeahsure.com"). This way one can immediately spot whoever sold their address to others and blacklist them. As said, those services work well but not being built in into mail servers and clients their adoption is quite restricted. I don't see why that function shouldn't be embedded in a new upgraded email protocol as the modification would neither be that hard nor consume any serious resource. I would however expect heavy resistance against the adoption, of course.
GDPR is clear on this and there have been significant fines for revealing email addresses against the will of their owners (e.g. using cc instead of bcc). Not saying this is the ultimate wisdom, just a data point to consider.
Buildings are analogous to domains, not email addresses.
I dunno. Should your personal phone number be private? Or your home address? Would you be okay if I knew it and shared it with a stranger? Or would you rather be asked permission to share it first?
Seems pretty cut and dry to me. Yeah, there's going to be someone out there (there always is) who doesn't care, but I'd wager the majority would be pretty ticked off if you gave those pieces of information out to a rando on the street.
An email address will be part of the xml in his uploads but also in his profile, which anyone can access by simply changing the url from https://archive.org/details/@foobar to https://archive.org/download/foobar. So, in essence, one just needs to have a registered account, independeltly any uploads made.
Theoretically, someone could scrape the pages and compile a list of exposed email addresses.
I laughed. Oh no! Anyways…
The people interested in identity theft are probably too busy figuring out what to do with all the SSNs they stole (not from this breach, but from the annual catastrophic breach of a credit bureau or government repository).
And the people who want your email probably already got it from one of the hundreds of other services you have to create an account for now.
I’m not really sure if there are circumstances where donating to the internet archive could be held against you and lead to persecution. Maybe in certain Luddite communities? The Amish? But then, how would they know…
He's moved on the next stage, but I was glad I was able to put his site back up.
It'll be a shame if IA goes down permanently, but we need a decentralized solution anyway.
Having a single mega organization in charge of our collective heritage isn't a good idea.
if anyone knows something like what I'm suggesting, I'd love to hear about it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_storage_cloud gives a few examples, like Filecoin.
The system that asks volunteers about their age, sex, location, and storage format details (the model, past use etc. can be used to predict the durability of a single storage) without sharing most of this data anywhere.
The downloaders are then algorithmically allocated pieces of the archive. Exampli gratia such that there is at least limited amount of overlap between the pieces, and two people same country won't provide redunancy for each other.
When a downloader verifies that they have completed the download by giving (unique, to prevent fake-download sabotage) SHA hashes of the data, the information that these pieces have been downloaded in this or that country, plus an estimate of the reliability of the storage, is added to a public database, for the algorithm to use in the future.
Every downloader is then generated a public and private key so that they can give the hash of their download again once in a while or just verify that the piece is still there. The reliability estimates (based on storage / hardware details) would be empirically calibrated based on the data about the actual storage failures.
A public counter, estimating how well the archive is currently backed up via this scheme, could be displayed.
For copyright issues, it would be possible to encrypt some of the data, e.g. such that normally borrowable items become readable files only when X% of downloads are pieced together.
The scheme would be primarily based on existing designs and algorithms but work roughly as depicted above. I am not an expert of what compression, hashing and other algorithms should be used, and it needs lots of good work, to determine how to avoid errors in the scientific part of estimating the reliability of the downloads—and generally a situation where it would turn out that lots of data was lost when attempting to put the pieces back together again.
Remark (engineering): To empirically validate the correctness of the software of the backup architecure by testing it on grids of real hard drives in single places will probably give safety against catastrophic failure. Even better would be to obtain large amount of old hard drives and SSDs kept in a single place for a long time, to validate that the software works over time.
Remark (integrity): That a downloader actually has the downloads can be verified efficiently by IA server adding small part to the piece the downloader has, hashing it again, and requesting the new hash.
Remark (redunancy): It may be possible to develop a social program that analyzes whether a volunteer in certain place can provide more redunancy by buying themselves a hard drive or by supporting the acquisition of hard drives for volunteers who have proved themselves realiable elsewhere. This is speculative and the benefit may be lower than the risks.
Finally, instead of "public database" it may be much more optimal to decide to use a blockchain of some sort. Not a cryptocurrency, but a blockchain. This is because if the idea is to distribute copies over the world to ensure continguency in case of IA main architecture collapse, then the more parts of the distributed backup architecture (which must actually not be "the backup architecture" but "a scheme", that no everyday IA decisions rely upon, and that just exists out there) are on a blockchain network run by a "decentralized" system, the more reliable it will be.
My heuristic plausibility analysis: 0. IA backup would not need to be constantly accessed or changed (this makes storage easier, cheaper and prolongs the maximun age of the storage) 1. Not all IA has to be backed up: a distrobuted backup that successfully recovers 10% of IA in a catastrophe is by all means a great success (consequently priorization of what might / should be stored should probably be part of the algorithm that decides what volunteers download; and what existing "big" archives already store that overlaps with IA should be taken into account in this analysis) 2. I recall you estimated 30-40 M USD ballparks for a single copy: a properly led open source project may be able to develop this for free, and fairly compensated one could be ~ 0.1% to 1% of the cost. 3. The Sia network https://siascan.com/ has space for 7PB; and it's for storage where one can download their own files at any time; and they have had very little publicity. 4. 2TB hard drive costs 50-100 USD and 20PB would be 10 000 humans buying one 2TB hard drive which by itself is possible. Hobbyists and organizations may be able to provide even larger capacities. 5. Most IT projects fail, but since lots of technology already exists and in this we know what we are doing and IA might be able to recruit above talent we can conservatively, give conservatively 50% chance the groundwork development to succeed, or 45% without funding. 6. If the develoment succeeds, then there may already be around ~ 100 potential volunteers. I estimated that 0.1% IA visitors may volunteer, plus 1% from Hacker News traffick were to project to be mentioned there, plus growth over first few years and traffick from elsewhere. Perhaps 75% chance to get 10% of IA backed up by volunteers, given development succeeds. 7. If that much is backed up, there is perhaps 5% of attaining 200 TB in next few decades.
Conservatively, given that open-source development starts, one gets apprx. 33% - 38% chance that 10% backup is achieved & apprx. 1-2% that 100% of what is now in the IA, could be backed up. These are of course rather meaningless numbers, but the fact seems that in the lack of funding to build a complete backup IA can best guarantee continguency by starting to build a distributed one. Perhaps this was needlessly lots of words for a simple proposal.
- X
---
Note: It's probable that at least the NSA has a private full IA backup.
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...
(just an example, as it's way overkill for the task)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/internet-arch...
Do they? Why?
My unique-to-archive.org email address is not there yet.
I have checked and known my address was in a hack and it isn't there, while other times it is there. I also wonder if they start filtering out by domain, as they see a domain across multiple databases with unique addresses in each database exactly one time.
$2a$
10$
Bho2e2ptPnFRJyJKIn5Bie
hIDiEwhjfMZFVRM9fRCarKXkemA3Pxu
ScottHelme
> Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!
I don't know what the best practice is for keeping our personal data safe anymore.
Sometimes with friendly / attempt-at-humorous error messages it’s difficult to tell
Obv an attackers ability to insert a message does imply a breach beyond a DoS. But I am pretty confident that message was not from the IA.
Update: Subdomain seems to be returning normal responses again now.
https://archive.org/metadata/naturally_a_girl/metadata
One way or another, there was going to be someone who would take loads of emails with a username attached to it. A bit intrigued by how the hacker compromised the database and got the passwords.
This honestly seems like a bit of a design flaw.
Already there are two new users just for this.
BTW, for the current account details, I changed the password to another random string generated by my password manager, and also deleted the masked email address and generated another one, so going forward this sort of thing isn't that much of an issue for me.
I found this reddit thread from /r/DataHoarder about backing up the internet archive particularly interesting, given the circumstances
1: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
hard-drive price: $0.014/GB
B2 price (12*6/1024): $0.070/GB/year
They have their own backups which I think is good enough for now unless someone plans on donating a few hundred million.
Bit of a shame the emails contain an ad for a password manager, saying there's two easy steps to become more secure: Step 1: use our password manager (fair enough), "Step 2: Enable 2 factor authentication and store the codes inside your [password manager]" ehh now it's back to 1 factor or am I missing something?
Edit: according to https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/internet-arch... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41793669), Troy Hunt / HIBP already received and verified this "three days ago" as of yesterday 6pm AoE
If you protect your password manager with a yubikey or any other hardware key, then your 2FA inside your password manager is quite secure and convenient. But this is very individual, what your threat model is and how secure you want/need to be.
> even if they got your password, if they don't have access to your password manager they can't login.
Wouldn't the same argument go for a non-2fa password? What's the difference between a randomly generated 2fa secret and a randomly generated password here?
But, doesn't a DB compromise mean that the attacker would have the TOTP seed as well? It can only increase your account security elsewhere, but also not re-using password prevents the IA leak from hurting you elsewhere as well?
Note I'm quoting HIBP's advice from the email they've sent me! I'm absolutely not recommending to store one's 2FA secrets in the same place as the password!
Even if one uses 2FA for the password manager, it stops proving "something you have" in addition to something you know and you're one unlock away from malware vacuuming it all up. The point of 2FA is to be on a separate device you need to have on hand
Of course, the same logic goes for a password manager in the first place, but password reuse is a big enough problem that (for most people's threat model) it seems to be a net positive. 2FA tokens don't have that reuse issue
I found this, not sure if it's still up-to-date:
◉ PHP's default implementation of bcrypt uses 10 rounds.
◉ Python's bcrypt library uses 12 rounds by default.
◉ Node.js's bcrypt library uses 10 rounds by default.
See also: https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb4...
brypt passwords are very slow to crack.
In fact, the Wayback Machine and the book archives are responding more quickly than they did for me a week ago, when I showed the Archive to the students in an online class I teach. I gave the students a homework assignment that involves accessing some old books at the Archive. That assignment is due in about 12 hours, and I was just getting ready to e-mail the students about the outage when I saw that the site is working again.
What info does archive.org have on people? Is this info scraped from other websites and stored in the archive.org database? Or is this info related to personal archive.org accounts (as I said I don't recall making an account)?
Now I'll have to dig through my IA account and remember if I donated to them directly via credit card (and if they stored it), or if it was through PayPal.
> Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!
But is this an official message from the company? It sounds odd and unprofessional, especially the "See 31 million of you on HIBP!" part, which jokingly refers to a huge privacy issue for users. Could it also be that the site was hacked, with hackers posting that message in addition to the data breach and DDoS attack?
>>>
Let me share more on the chronology of this:
30 Sep: Someone sends me the breach, but I'm travelling and didn't realise the significance
5 Oct: I get a chance to look at it - whoa!
6 Oct: I get in contact with someone at IA and send the data, advising it's our goal to load within 72 hours
7 Oct: They confirm and I ask for a disclosure notice
8 Oct: I follow up on the disclosure notice and advise we'll load tomorrow
9 Oct: They get defaced and DDoS'd, right as the data is loading into HIBP
The timing on the last point seems to be entirely coincidental. It may also be multiple parties involved and when we're talking breach + defacement + DDoS, it's clearly not just one attack.
<<<
It could also be that the attacker has compromised IA communication channels and timed it for maximum dramatic effect and confusion.
IA is an incredibly valuable resource, but let’s not put them on a pedestal.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/internet-arch...
Consolation is that I used a randomly generated unique password, tried to reset my credentials and see of any 2FA options but the site is overloaded throwing 504s.
That is. Paying over 100k at the lower end of the range for 3y experience as software engineer
- I have a catch all setup to forward all emails to specific user on mail server
- able to setup adhoc email addresses for each online service (ie, iarch@example.com)
- able to claim example.com in haveibeenpwned
Now I get breach emails from hibp for the whole domain. Unfortunately, I was exposed in this IA breach
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/developer-platform/email-ro...
The rest of apple's email landscape sucks. It is pretty poor at managing spam, the client is terrible, it doesn't sync rules between the desktop app, icloud email, and iphone.
I hate email in general. It is getting to be 1 in a 100 type scenario of anything of value and likely worse if I knew all the emails that were deleted before I saw them.
Cashier: "What's your email?"
Me: "walmart@somedomain.com"
Cashier: "No I meant YOUR email address."
Me: "Yeah walmart@somedomain.com"
Cashier: "Oh do you work for Walmart???"
Me: "No see I set up my email so... oh nevermind, 420BLAZEIT@GMAIL.COM"Fun fact! Troy actually got this database back in Sep. 30th.
We need not one but many internet archives. Just one and we will repeat the outcome of the Library of Alexandria.
"Goodwill and donations" will never be robust against an entire industry that makes profit off of artificial digital scarcity.
"Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!"
Maybe they managed to convince some critical service like an SSL cert provider that they were the owners of the subdomain? I don't know still wouldn't explain access to user and password database.
Does IA store anything sensitive for any users?p physical addresses, credit cards, etc?
I hope that this event makes some forward-thinking benevolent rich folks step up, or alternative solution.
Is it safe to assume the hacker want to erase the evidence?
Forcing the service offline also means they want to prevent people from archiving evidence in the next how-ever-long hours. Combining with the spoken language they used in that video, are they planning some online disinformation campaign?
----
Edit: some more info about this group: https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1g0kupb/hacktiv...
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This group claims to be pro palestinian and it's entirely based on Russia.
[https://therecord.media/middle-east-financial-institution-6-...
>SN\_BLACKMETA has operated its Telegram channel since November 2023, boasting of DDoS incidents and cyberattacks on infrastructure in Israel, the Palestinian Territories and elsewhere. While all of the group’s messages focus on the Palestinian Territories and perceived opponents to Palestine, many of its posts are written in Russian.
>The group’s account on X also shows that it was created by someone in Staraya, a town in Novgorod Oblast, Russia. The account’s initial language was also set to Russian.
>The researchers added that analysis of timestamps and activity patterns showed possible evidence that the actors within the group are operating in a timezone “close to Moscow Standard Time (MSK, UTC+3) or other Middle Eastern or Eastern European time zones (UTC+2 to UTC+4).”
~~Attacks include pro palestine sites and groups, so~~ take that "pro palestine" with a grain of salt.
EDIT: edited for clarity on what is actually in the article and not in outside anonymous sources. If you want to read more, [there's a clearer report on one of their attacks and their usual targets.](https://www.radware.com/security/threat-advisories-and-attac...)
How is someone stupid enough to post this? Warrant for the account's IP is probably already issued. I don't know how many proxies the guy is behind, but it's playing with fire.
Also at some point the account of a malicious hacker has to be banned right?
On one hand, I love IA
On the other hand…I’m in a long thread with their support right now on removing old snapshots of a social media account I have. Creeps are actively using the old snapshots to dox me and send me death threats using my PII.
It’s incredibly frustrating and IA keeps insisting they cannot do anything about it.
A small part of me hoped IA didn’t recover from today because I knew my info would be finally deleted :/
Sucks to hear you are getting doxxed still
Not downplaying or excusing; just adding context that IA aren't the only ones and it's difficult to prevent (since the cause can be well outside of the individual's control).
A special place in Hell…
Now, it depends what the "it" is referring to here, but so far all I've heard is about an alert() message saying the usernames will be sent to a breach alerting site. If they're doing it just for the heck of it, it's still costing a lot of people a lot of time that they could have spent doing better things, but I'd reserve special places in hell for the people who do plan this out carefully and make malicious demands
They stated on twitter because IA is controlled by "the US" and is "pro Israel".
could also just be RU larping under another flag. They have done this in the past with groups like Anonymous Sudan.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I mean... would it be better if the hackers had asked for money or did it to protest global warming or something?