Archive.today's attack on https://gyrovague.com is still on-going btw. It started just over two months ago. Some IPs get through normally but for example finnish residential IPs get stuck on endless captchas. The JS snippet that starts spamming gyrovague appears after solving the first captcha.
I'm not a web developer, but I've picked up some bits of knowledge here and there, mostly from troubleshooting issues I encounter while using websites.
I know there are a number of headers used to control cross-site access to websites, and the linked blog post shows archive.today's denial-of-service script sending random queries to the site's search function. Shouldn't there be a way to prevent those from running when they're requested from within a third-party site?
Cloudflare dns has gone back and forth on whether it wants to resolve them since 2019. It’s taken that away and restored it again (intentionally? mistake?) at least four times.
The c&c/botnet designation would seem to be new though.
As far as I am aware, all previous issues with archive.today and Cloudflare were on account of archive.today taking measures to stop Cloudflare's DNS from correctly resolving their domains, not the other way around.
The current situation is due to Cloudflare flagging archive.today's domains for malicious activity, Cloudflare actually still resolves the domains on their normal 1.1.1.1 DNS, but 1.1.1.2 ("No Malware") now refuses. Exactly why they decided to flag their domains now, over a month after the denial-of-service accusations came out, is unclear, maybe someone here has more information.
Have they? The thing I remember previously was archive.is, and it wasn’t a block, archive.is was serving intentionally wrong responses to queries from cloudflare’s resolvers.
This is notably not a change to how 1.1.1.1 works, it’s specifically their filtered resolution product.
Intentionally, I believe? archive.today iirc has explicitly blocking Cloudflare from resolving them at various times over the years due to Cloudflare DNS withholding requesting-user PII (ip address) in DNS lookups.
Looking forward to when Google Safe Browsing adds their domains as unsafe, as that ripples to Chrome and Firefox users.
Why? It’s accurate and if the owner has chosen to do this for months now, why should we ever trust they won’t again? Nobody should ever use that site and every optional filter should block them.
There's probably a worthwhile discussion to be had about what it takes for a site in this situation to be removed from blocklists. An apology? Surrender to authorities? Halting the malicious activity for a certain period of time?
Regardless, another user reports the attack is still ongoing[1], so this isn't a discussion that's going to happen about archive.today anytime soon.
Because once the problematic content is removed it should no longer be blocked.
>It's accurate
It is neither a C&C server for a botnet, nor any other server related to a botnet. I would not call it accurate.
>Nobody should ever use that site
It has a good reputation for archiving sites, has stead the test of time, and doesn't censor pages like archive.org does allowing you to actually see the history of news articles instead of them being deleted like archive.org does on occasion.
The site started doctoring archived versions as part of the petty feud. That is, what was supposed to be a historical record, suddenly had content manipulated so as to feed into this fight[0]. There is no redemption. You want to be an archive, you keep it sacrosanct. Put an obvious hosting-site banner overlay if you must, but manipulating the archive is a red-line that was crossed.
...On 20 February 2026, English Wikipedia banned links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with to insert Patokallio's name.[19] The decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability[19] while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects.[20] The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict.[19][20]
If archive.today was known to be run by a woman, would you still describe the stalking and harassment by Jani Patokallio as a "petty feud"?
At least in my social circles, this kind of behavior is viewed in an extremely negative light. Stalkers are about as universally disliked as pedophiles.
It's not just problematic content, it's criminal behavior. And the site has a bad reputation for archival, given that the owner altered the content of archived articles.
Archive.today's attack on https://gyrovague.com is still on-going btw. It started just over two months ago. Some IPs get through normally but for example finnish residential IPs get stuck on endless captchas. The JS snippet that starts spamming gyrovague appears after solving the first captcha.
I'm not a web developer, but I've picked up some bits of knowledge here and there, mostly from troubleshooting issues I encounter while using websites.
I know there are a number of headers used to control cross-site access to websites, and the linked blog post shows archive.today's denial-of-service script sending random queries to the site's search function. Shouldn't there be a way to prevent those from running when they're requested from within a third-party site?
Good. You don't get to use my computer for a DDoS. I don't care why the DDoS was happening. I wasn't asked, and that's a serious breach of trust.
"archive.today is currently categorized as: * CIPA Filter * Reference * Command and Control & Botnet * DNS Tunneling"
Ditto for their other domains like archive.is and archive.ph
Example DoH request:
$ curl -s "https://1.1.1.2/dns-query?name=archive.is&type=A" -H "accept: application/dns-json"
{"Status":0,"TC":false,"RD":true,"RA":true,"AD":false,"CD":false,"Question":[{"name":"archive.is","type":1}],"Answer":[{"name":"archive.is","type":1,"TTL":60,"data":"0.0.0.0"}],"Comment":["EDE(16): Censored"]}
---
Relevant HN discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 "Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006 "Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 "Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?" - Post about the script used to execute the denial-of-service attack
Wikipedia page on deprecating and replacing archive.today links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
Cloudflare dns has gone back and forth on whether it wants to resolve them since 2019. It’s taken that away and restored it again (intentionally? mistake?) at least four times.
The c&c/botnet designation would seem to be new though.
As far as I am aware, all previous issues with archive.today and Cloudflare were on account of archive.today taking measures to stop Cloudflare's DNS from correctly resolving their domains, not the other way around.
The current situation is due to Cloudflare flagging archive.today's domains for malicious activity, Cloudflare actually still resolves the domains on their normal 1.1.1.1 DNS, but 1.1.1.2 ("No Malware") now refuses. Exactly why they decided to flag their domains now, over a month after the denial-of-service accusations came out, is unclear, maybe someone here has more information.
Have they? The thing I remember previously was archive.is, and it wasn’t a block, archive.is was serving intentionally wrong responses to queries from cloudflare’s resolvers.
This is notably not a change to how 1.1.1.1 works, it’s specifically their filtered resolution product.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
Intentionally, I believe? archive.today iirc has explicitly blocking Cloudflare from resolving them at various times over the years due to Cloudflare DNS withholding requesting-user PII (ip address) in DNS lookups.
Looking forward to when Google Safe Browsing adds their domains as unsafe, as that ripples to Chrome and Firefox users.
When the heat dies down, hopefully this flag gets removed.
Why? It’s accurate and if the owner has chosen to do this for months now, why should we ever trust they won’t again? Nobody should ever use that site and every optional filter should block them.
There's probably a worthwhile discussion to be had about what it takes for a site in this situation to be removed from blocklists. An apology? Surrender to authorities? Halting the malicious activity for a certain period of time?
Regardless, another user reports the attack is still ongoing[1], so this isn't a discussion that's going to happen about archive.today anytime soon.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474777
Because it's not the place of a DNS resolver to police the internet.
This particular revolver is an opt-in service for users that want Cloudflare to block anything that Cloudflare designates as malware.
>Why?
Because once the problematic content is removed it should no longer be blocked.
>It's accurate
It is neither a C&C server for a botnet, nor any other server related to a botnet. I would not call it accurate.
>Nobody should ever use that site
It has a good reputation for archiving sites, has stead the test of time, and doesn't censor pages like archive.org does allowing you to actually see the history of news articles instead of them being deleted like archive.org does on occasion.
The site started doctoring archived versions as part of the petty feud. That is, what was supposed to be a historical record, suddenly had content manipulated so as to feed into this fight[0]. There is no redemption. You want to be an archive, you keep it sacrosanct. Put an obvious hosting-site banner overlay if you must, but manipulating the archive is a red-line that was crossed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.todayIf archive.today was known to be run by a woman, would you still describe the stalking and harassment by Jani Patokallio as a "petty feud"?
At least in my social circles, this kind of behavior is viewed in an extremely negative light. Stalkers are about as universally disliked as pedophiles.
It is in fact a botnet - they’ve been hijacking user browsers to act as a botnet to DDoS.
It's not just problematic content, it's criminal behavior. And the site has a bad reputation for archival, given that the owner altered the content of archived articles.