NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly talks with Brewster Khale, the founder of Internet Archive, about the attack by hackers that put the archive offline for days — and what may have happened if it had succeeded.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Who preserves what happens on the internet? Well, one answer can be found in an old church in San Francisco, which is home to the Internet Archive. That’s a nonprofit with a bigger digital collection than the Library of Congress. The Archive holds a record of billions of web pages on its servers. This month, it was attacked by hackers. It was offline for days, prompting a question – what would get lost if the Internet Archive is no more? Brewster Kahle is the founder of Internet Archive, and he’s on the line now from San Francisco. Welcome.
BREWSTER KAHLE: Thank you very much, Mary Louise.
KELLY: So I just checked. Your site looks like it’s up and running. It’s online. Is everything back and fully restored?
KAHLE: It’s not fully restored, but the basic services of archive.org and the Wayback Machine – yes, our library is back, which is really wonderful.
KELLY: The Wayback Machine – just to inject – this is the archival service for your website.
KAHLE: Yes, yes. That’s where we collect web pages by working with 1,300 libraries, and then we make a service – a free service to make it so you could see the web as it was.
KELLY: So can you just describe what these last couple of weeks have looked like for you as you’ve tried to get the website back online and keep it up and running?
KAHLE: Oh, it’s been so hard. Basically, we needed to upgrade our security significantly because, basically, somebody was able to deface our website. There’s no damage to the data, which is great, but they did get our usernames and email addresses of patrons of the Internet Archive. So people’s passwords continue to be safe because they were all encrypted, but the list of email addresses doesn’t help the spam problem out there.
KELLY: Yeah. So why would hackers target you?
KAHLE: We don’t know, but we’re not the only ones. So, yes, we were targeted with cyberattacks, but also Calgary Public Library got hit, and they’re still offline. Seattle Public Library system was attacked, and they’re mostly back up – Toronto Public Library. And the big one was British Library was attacked a year ago, and still some of their services aren’t back up.
KELLY: There’s no ransom that’s been demanded, nothing like that?
KAHLE: No. No, there hasn’t been that. It’s mostly been embarrassing. So we have gotten the message, and we’re addressing – putting in more and better firewalls and code sanitization to go and make sure that the services stay up as people are expecting.
KELLY: Yeah. There’s obviously a rich irony here for a site dedicated to preserving activity on the internet potentially being wiped off the internet. What would be lost if a cyberattack had actually succeeded at damaging your site permanently?
KAHLE: Well, if the Internet Archive were to go away – it has unique collections of the World Wide Web and also books, music, video, television for decades of television. It’s a full-fledged library. So the idea of losing the Internet Archive is not just the web collection, but it would be a whole lot more.
KELLY: What you’re describing, Mr. Kahle, is such a huge responsibility, protecting all of this information. Are you confident you can do it?
KAHLE: We’ll do everything we can. As part of the job, we have preservation and access sort of tattooed into our souls. So preservation to go and make sure that the information that we’ve collected stays, and then we – can we make it as accessible as possible? We first wanted to make sure that our preservation function was in good shape, which we did. And then we worked very hard to try to get the access back up. But we’re seeing attacks on libraries from many different angles, and this is just another one.
KELLY: That is Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive. Thank you.
KAHLE: Thank you.
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