this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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"The data is not affected." You know, that's an interesting thing to point out. The attackers clearly want to restrict access to information, possibly specific information, possibly information in general.
However, whoever is in charge of this DDoS is clearly fulfilling a directive of "prevent access to it." And they clearly don't realize that a DDoS is temporary. Do they have a plan for when it's back up? They can't just DDoS forever, unless they plan on DDoSing the entire internet. And I don't see them having the resources literally the rest of the world has.
Not "clearly" at all. It could be as simple as someone new to coding doing it accidentally, probably using masking of their request origins (granted, this does not seem very likely at all...:-D).
Also, it forces the archive to expend resources that they could have allocated elsewhere - which would have longer-term consequences far beyond the short-term duration of the attack. Enough attacks like these could cause the archive to deprioritize something else that they had wanted to do, or drop something they used to support but won't be able to continue to do so in that case.
Or, why does a bully hit someone? That too offers purely short-term pain, until the next attack. Yet they do it anyway, and often it works to cow the victim into submission so that future attacks aren't even necessary, and instead the mere threat of one may be sufficient for the bully to get their way.
Also, does the entire rest of the world submit funding to the internet archive? I don't know anything about their finances, but compared to those of e.g. Russian disinformation sources or corporate profit-seeking, surely they are tiny in comparison?
The only thing "clear" here is that the attacker seems to be using the Might Is Right principle, as they are stepping outside the bounds of society to take on this vigilante effort by themselves.
Would that even be possible? How would someone just scripting kidding around cause a major outage?
If each request simply came from the same IP address then yeah, all the recipient has to do is block that one and the whole attack is over.
But what if piracy websites were trying to stream content directly from the internet archive rather than make a copy of it first, and messed up to cause this attack. So intentional to cause the traffic but unintentional to cause this amount of it. Or even if those websites first opened the door, and then someone tried to DDoS them, which propagated onwards to the internet archive, whether knowingly or otherwise.
Anyway, I was just postulating that it was theoretically possible... and odder things have and continue to happen all the time so who knows?:-P