edit: Maybe I should have titled this "claim to have discovered" as there is no external verification, and no write up. I thought I should post this in any case.
For everyone's information: r/Seattle's mod team has stickied this technical debrief in response to this HN post. We are the "external site" that is kinda brigading them.
I presumed DDoS was used colloquially, but no, they literally added JS so every visitor made a request every 0.3 seconds to that blog server, in response to a blog article. Wholly malicious based on the reporting.
Yeah, everyone is freaking out about the (not very efficient as I can see) DDoS attempt, but it was a response to a totally unprovoked attempt to deanon the maintainer which could cost them freedom at least - and us all the only more or less reliable paywall remover.
To make my edit in the parent clear: HN mods have changed the title, to the exact title of the post reddit on r/seattle. This is understandable.
I always respect the "don't editorialize" rule, but felt that this was a special case as the post title is so sub-reddit specific. My original post title was along the lines of "r/Seattle mods discover archive.today injecting malware, ban site.
You get 429 if you visit the link directly. Not sure what mechanism is used to tell that, doesn't seem to be the referrer though. This does the refresh to the malware site:
Interesting. Same behavior here with a generic User-Agent and no Cookie header at all.
Response headers mention an onion-location and link to stolidityseashellshotter... but also mementoweb... pretty strange. Most generously, maybe some kind of cache poison instead of explicit bad behavior?
The page has other links that all go to archive.today. Seems like any link to a PDF causes this to happen. https://archive.ph/Y6BOX near "Download the PDF, which contains the dolls and all of the looks, here." Wonder if it's all links in general that aren't archived.
This looks like some kind of misconfiguration more than intent, or a mix, but it's still bad.
Wow, yeah, same two redirects for that PDF link. Geez. It'd sure be interesting to know the full cause here, otherwise it really destroys a lot of trust in the tool.
Edit: It sure does seem to be a PDF problem, these were both NYT things, but I tried a CCC talk page that had a slides link and sure enough, same behavior.
no one can view old.reddit.com w/o being authorized. idk if you're aware, but it lost a lot of appeal as such. what i'm saying is, folks can view reddit.com w/o logging in, but not old.reddit.com
Personally, as scummy as archive.today is at times, I can generally trust them to have an honest archive about, say, someone’s drunk post before said drunk deletes the post.
Old still exists and gets heavy use a decade or so later exactly because regular reddit just doesn't work at all, even when you're logged in.
But even aside from opinions on their UX, they're aggressively experimenting with the login more... Even on the new UI I now semi-regularly see that I can read the initial post and one or two comments but as soon as I scroll past or try to expand a comment thread get a login prompt.
I wonder if the redirect target is region based, because my redirect took me to the fake Github page. I'm in the US. A fake RT article rhymes with the well established doppelganger propaganda campaign, which could rationalize why it would be region based. The irony of the doppelganger campaign being a Russian state-sponsored campaign is not lost on me.
Without clear and irrefutable evidence, which is nearly impossible, the Vault 7 releases should have been more than adequate to quell any doubts that you can believe any kind of claim of foreign campaigns. Why would a V Russian operation link to a fake RT site? A discerning individual world always anime that whatever you are being directed towards is the least likely accurate/correct thing.
> Unlike the Reddit mods, I'm not getting redirected to the malware site, just the fake RT site.
Well, this got on the front page of HN... Such things make even FAANG behemoths pay attention. What I mean is, who knows what happened since r/Seattle called it out.
Does some other archive, archive the archiver?
There might be a cryptographic solution for this problem, but that's far beyond my knowledge set.
Also, as the peer comment pointed out, it could be geo-scoped. You know, like a targeted attack.
The entire reason that I posted this originally is that I cannot think of a juicier userbase than HN. We all post archive.is links every single time. Given that operator's history, we are doing the link-click analogy of pasting shell commands from the web into our terminals. We should know better by now, but complacency leads to ___.
Not sure what to believe here. Wouldn't it be possible to create a site that has some js embedded that is able to be aware of archive's process so that the archived page renders a different page than the original? Could that secondary page be what is trying to deliver the malware, using archive as an unwitting laundry? That matches the MO of malware delivery via other services, no? I'm baffled as to why the mods don't provide any details whatsoever. There are more links to the controversy between the blogger who sought archive's webmasters identity than details of this incident. The mods in this subreddit are doubling down on not sharing details under the guise of "not our job to be infosec". Perhaps a write up is in due time but at the moment this feels like a sketchy extension of the aforementioned drama
Edit: Another r/seattle moderator (not the OP of the original post) has posted their technical writeup of the malware, which is detailed and definitely more in line with what we'd expect with this kind of PSA. While I stand by all criticisms of the OP moderator and their initial handling of the disclosure, you can find the details of the incident in this excellent write up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
Same kind of spite that led them to block the entire country of Finland? The site owner clearly isn't above attacks based on existing in the same country as someone who's slighted them.
Seems unlikely to be the case here if what one of the mods said is true:
> We verified this isn't just us or just this source (it's a link in a NYT article to a PDF anyway, about the most safe combo I can think of)
Might be able to find the article in question by looking for NYT links posted to the subreddit recently (if the presumably-deleted archive link was posted separately as a reply).
Perhaps, but it could also just be "take our word for it" devolving into more "take our extended word for it". Being prepared to make an alarming enough claim that it sparks discussion outside of the sub but being unwilling to provide evidence remains suspicious.
That suspicion becomes more grounded when the conversation with the subreddits mod regarding why the claim was made without a willingness to provide evidence looks like this:
>If you're going to make an allegation like this, it's necessary to be specific. Specifically, what is the malware, and what is the evidence that it was "injected"? This is "consult a security researcher" and "speak to the media" territory, not "mod announcement" territory.
>>No it's not. These archive sites are a legal gray area anyway. We don't have to consult anyone to decide not to allow the links. No we are not talking to the media, we're not providing research, or a proof. I'm not calling the mayor. We are reddit mods . This is purely about community management.
Is it a power trip stemming from a technical misunderstanding (archive.today exploited to deliver malware =/= archive.today attempting to deliver malware) or is it something else? In any case, reading the comments on reddit, seems like the mods are going out of their way to appeal to hysterics.
As much effort that has been put into trying to subjugate and control archive.today, it makes me immediately leery of believing any of this was some kind of deliberate thing on behalf of archive.today.
It’s not to say it’s not so, but people are fools to just chomp down on the bait.
Seems like the moderators don't know what's going on and are blacklisting it out of abundance of caution. Cause whether the malware comes from the archived site or the archiver itself, it means the archiver isn't safe in a way. Which is fine. It's just ridiculous that someone is asking for details and getting ostracized as a result.
This attitude is extended when someone else asks a question about evidence, instead of replying to the question, the moderator sarcastically calls out the commentor for posting in the sub for the first time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
Its unusual and arguably suspicious because this attitude is antithetical to the stated point of the thread: To make a PSA to the community. They've also limited the comment section to only flaired users, which seems quite unusual given that this thread is ground-zero for a newsworthy claim.
Eh, still think simplest explanation is most likely here, which is that there's no secret motive, but the mods and some users over there are just dumb. I don't mean because they're nontechnical or don't have randomly specific web knowledge (one of them actually does), it's about how they responded to people.
Now that the evidence is shared and reproducible, I agree with you. This should be an embarrassing moment for the r/seattle mods, but I somewhat doubt it will be. Glad a more level headed conversation found its way to HN.
What's to be embarassed? These are busy community moderators, not whitehat hackers. They don't owe anyone a writeup of technical vulnerabilities. They owe the community clear communication of rule changes and most people expect explanation of why rules were changed, and they delivered both.
They did actually made a technical claim, which is fine, but then when someone said this is serious and asked for details, they responded with attitude and defensiveness. The mods don't need to be white-hat hackers, and even if they were, they're still dumb. They could've just said, all we know at the moment is we kept getting redirected to this malware site, so we're blocking this.
The craziest part is the guy asking even apologized, probably cause he was getting downvoted too much and actually cares about appeasing them.
Community moderator is a stressful thankless job, especially on a subreddit with a reasonable amount of (often political) content, PARTICULARLY on one regularly brigaded by trolls and antagonists from a competing subreddit, so I'm going to cut a lot of slack to the unpaid volunteers who put up with a lot of hate directed at them.
A few hours after I posted this: I am so glad that r/seattle mods found this, and the HN community forced more disclosure (sorry Jaco_Belordi and rest of team - you probably have other jobs as well). This is the system working as intended. This is the best of the modern Internet.
Here are my suppositions and questions:
The frontier labs feel free to use the path of least resistance to acquire more data. Currently, one of those paths must be archive.today. Proof of that is that an archive.is link is posted here on HN, for any news post, right? I certainly find those links useful.
So, now that we know that archive.today is the easiest path to paywalled data, is a threat actor, and can poison training data...
1. What is their valuation?
2. Will the labs stop using them? Is it even fair to assume that they are?
I read through the comment thread there. There's almost no explanation of what's going on, not even the offending URL. When someone asked, he got downvoted a bunch and ridiculed, which reminds me of why I don't have a Reddit account. I don't trust archive.today because of its track record but don't trust this particular allegation either. The news is simply that a subreddit moderator blacklisted archive.today.
They've added a comment explaining what they saw, with the offending URL. It's indeed archive.today itself sending visitors to the malware download site.
No it doesn't. Aside from people here actually being curious about things, the site itself isn't designed for flame wars. It also makes it hard to get downvoted so much that your account goes into questionable standing. I'm guessing people on Reddit fix that by farming karma somewhere else, but no way am I going to bother with that.
FWIW it's quite easy to farm karma to get to the downvote threshold. If you go to any of the energetic political HN threads, you just need to submit an enthusiastic comment that is pro the dominant position and you'll get tens of upvotes quite quickly. Do that for a week and you'll be ready to downvote. Before HN had LLM detection I had an experiment with an LLM doing that (though I approved everything it wrote by hand) and farmed karma very quickly. I stopped because I felt quite gross about it, but realize it's probably trivial to do now.
The problem isn't really the site, it's the people. People like smashing the up and down buttons on things they agree with and unfortunately a comment's score affects where it shows up on the page.
I think it's a shame that copyright laws don't allow us to host a non shady alternative to this. The only reason people use such dubious sites is that there's no other way to share a link to a news site without risking that the text will be altered later or hidden behind a paywall.
One legal way to share news stories which generate controversy is to have an AI make a summary of the article, rewording it to remove any copyright from the article (this legal trick only works when the news site in question is reporting on factual events, since facts can’t be copied as per Feist vs. Rural 1991, and I make sure that the summary has “a different sequence, pace, and setting than the original article” as per legal judgments on whether an AI summary of factual events as reported by a news source is subject to copyright).
It might be useful for your own memory since you can decide that you trust what was written. IE you trust that when it was written, you agreed at the time that it was an accurate summary, and later you only have to trust your earlier self.
But "My ai said that the site said ~essentially~ this on this date." is useless for anything else.
But it suggests an interesting idea. Maybe if we had some ai equivalent of trusted vetted accountable court reporters who write down notes and draw sketches in rooms where cameras aren't allowed.
That is purely second-hand reporting that we more or less trust, partly because there is usually more than one of them from competing venues reporting on the same event, partly because they are people with something to lose if they are unfaithful or even merely inept, partly because the facts are ultimately vettable with some effort for those who really need to.
There's no such ai yet. Even if one exists that could do the job, there is no consensus or basis for it, for everyone to recognize it as a trustworthy source of second hand reporting. But maybe if there were more than one and operated by different camps, they could grow to become recognized as a valid source of info.
There's been quite a lot of people still defending the site. Basically "who cares about DDoS attacks and altering archived sites' content when it allows bypassing paywalls?"
Setting my user-agent to Googlebot in a private window bypasses most paywalls just fine. Surprised at how many sites aren't checking against the published IP ranges.
not sure why this is downvoted. they modified their captcha so that visitors contributed to a ddos against a blog, on top of a handful of other threats, tampering of archived data, etc.
As a personal vendetta against Jani Patokallio (a Finnish cybersecurity blogger) who was trying to unmask the person who ran the site - which goes back to 2023.
I don't really care about that though, because trying to dox someone and get them killed isn't a good or moral thing to do. You could easily just not do that. You have to really go out of your way to try and hunt someone down, and at any point you could just not do it. For the targeted person to want revenge is just an inevitability.
i can certainly spin one up, use your site visits to DDoS people i dont like, and secretly edit the archived content if you want? apparently that will win me an army of hn defenders.
so fucking strange that people are playing defense for that. even forgetting the DDoS part, people don't care that they are editing archived content? wild.
Residential proxies DDoSing half the internet is standard operating procedure this decade and yet everyone still buys connected garbage and monetizes their apps this way.
"We investigated the "filed on Tuesday" link in an archived NYT article (hxxps://archive.ph/jXv3A). It's supposed to lead to a lawsuit PDF hosted by the plaintiff's law firm. Instead, clicking the link leads to an ad/phishing network and intermittently serves instructions to run elevated cURL commands, advertising pages, and ZIP-downloads.
Archive.today's /o/ endpoint itself returned the instruction to redirect, not the original source URL. We observed this in more formal testing on October 28, 2026, at approximately 07:35 UTC.
The link's actual href on the archived version of the page was:
Until somebody invents a solution for bypassing paywalls at scale, they are not going away. It's like people asking "why don't AI companies release their training data".
Disappointing but not that surprising; it's been banned from Wikipedia for months because it was enlisting viewers' computers in a DDoS against an investigative journalist for trying to figure out who was behind it. But it's the only way I've found to access a lot of information that is otherwise lost. So, what do we do?
That's been my nagging fear about them too. Obviously it's not an option they'd want to exercise frequently, but it could be devastating to individual targets.
(ofc this is a risk with the Wayback Machine, who also has a policy for honoring takedown request. But the Internet Archive's board and executives are known people with reputations)
Yes, and archiving as a practice became popular when people noticed that media sites were beginning to edit or delete articles without listing a correction, sometimes after the story had already circulated widely. Previously, editors would usually make a note of such things.
(This is why archives that bypass paywalls are particularly important. I wish we had more options here.)
Link to comment explaining the discovery:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
edit: Maybe I should have titled this "claim to have discovered" as there is no external verification, and no write up. I thought I should post this in any case.
Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 (8 months ago, 366 points, 178 comments)
Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 (9 months ago, 140 points, 71 comments)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
I presumed DDoS was used colloquially, but no, they literally added JS so every visitor made a request every 0.3 seconds to that blog server, in response to a blog article. Wholly malicious based on the reporting.
I always respect the "don't editorialize" rule, but felt that this was a special case as the post title is so sub-reddit specific. My original post title was along the lines of "r/Seattle mods discover archive.today injecting malware, ban site.
I'm confused though, it says the site injected malware into its archived form. But the HN title says archive.today injected the malware.
The claim is that archive.today is injecting malware into archived pages. Given some of the past behavior, this is not hard to believe.
Idk, maybe this is just a typo, but grammatically this is saying the article injected the links.
(To be fair, that isn't the only redirect so you might need to click it a few times.)
Whereas other links (e.g. the immediate next one to arxiv) seem unaffected.
edit: That was a red herring. It seems to redirect all .pdf links I try that don't point to a valid snapshot. Very interesting.
Just for the sake of preserving what I did see, the URL linked in the text was:
and that now seems to have been purged from the archive.today cache, as this page says "No results":https://archive.ph/https://schenklawfirm.com/wp-content/uplo...
Response headers mention an onion-location and link to stolidityseashellshotter... but also mementoweb... pretty strange. Most generously, maybe some kind of cache poison instead of explicit bad behavior?
This looks like some kind of misconfiguration more than intent, or a mix, but it's still bad.
Edit: It sure does seem to be a PDF problem, these were both NYT things, but I tried a CCC talk page that had a slides link and sure enough, same behavior.
And it is federated so when the biggest Lemmy instance starts to suck, Lemmy can be the Lemmy replacement, too.
I understand that mentioning it on popular subreddits is verboten.
https://lemmy.world/
That's the entire reason I use old.reddit - the New Reddit backend is a pile of unreliable dung. Just like everything that is made with GraphQL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickFix
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
https://archive.ph/HcOq2 (This is a link to the post for this article)
(If one’s ISP can’t access archive.today, I find that Firefox’s built in free VPN can usually access them)
Or, you can use on of the various Reddit scrapers, e.g:
https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archi...
Here’s a list of Reddit scrapers:
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
Personally, as scummy as archive.today is at times, I can generally trust them to have an honest archive about, say, someone’s drunk post before said drunk deletes the post.
But even aside from opinions on their UX, they're aggressively experimenting with the login more... Even on the new UI I now semi-regularly see that I can read the initial post and one or two comments but as soon as I scroll past or try to expand a comment thread get a login prompt.
Previous HN thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740
It redirected me to https://stolidityseashellshotter[.]com/ezrsb5dd1268e6f6ebaad... which then redirected me to a fake clone of RT news: https://rurtnews[.]com/
Unlike the Reddit mods, I'm not getting redirected to the malware site, just the fake RT site.
Edit: I clicked it a few more times and its redirecting me to either the fake RT or https://gullible-thanks[.]com/w5FDGi, which redirects to either https://sportshard[.]com/ or https://eatcells[.]com/land/?token=[a random string]
I had to disable uBlock Origin, since it does something to block many of these redirects.
Well, this got on the front page of HN... Such things make even FAANG behemoths pay attention. What I mean is, who knows what happened since r/Seattle called it out.
Does some other archive, archive the archiver?
There might be a cryptographic solution for this problem, but that's far beyond my knowledge set.
Also, as the peer comment pointed out, it could be geo-scoped. You know, like a targeted attack.
The entire reason that I posted this originally is that I cannot think of a juicier userbase than HN. We all post archive.is links every single time. Given that operator's history, we are doing the link-click analogy of pasting shell commands from the web into our terminals. We should know better by now, but complacency leads to ___.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
Edit: Another r/seattle moderator (not the OP of the original post) has posted their technical writeup of the malware, which is detailed and definitely more in line with what we'd expect with this kind of PSA. While I stand by all criticisms of the OP moderator and their initial handling of the disclosure, you can find the details of the incident in this excellent write up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
> We verified this isn't just us or just this source (it's a link in a NYT article to a PDF anyway, about the most safe combo I can think of)
Might be able to find the article in question by looking for NYT links posted to the subreddit recently (if the presumably-deleted archive link was posted separately as a reply).
That suspicion becomes more grounded when the conversation with the subreddits mod regarding why the claim was made without a willingness to provide evidence looks like this:
>If you're going to make an allegation like this, it's necessary to be specific. Specifically, what is the malware, and what is the evidence that it was "injected"? This is "consult a security researcher" and "speak to the media" territory, not "mod announcement" territory.
>>No it's not. These archive sites are a legal gray area anyway. We don't have to consult anyone to decide not to allow the links. No we are not talking to the media, we're not providing research, or a proof. I'm not calling the mayor. We are reddit mods . This is purely about community management.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
Originally posted here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xh57il/removed_by...
The "filed on Tuesday" link seems to go to gullible-thanks[.]com, which redirects to random shady sites.
Edit: Now there is something here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/comment/19...
Unbelievable that the comment asking for evidence sits at -24 upvotes in that thread as of now. https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
It’s not to say it’s not so, but people are fools to just chomp down on the bait.
The moderators seem to be making it quite clear: they do know what is going on and the onus is not on them to prove it, only to notify actions have been taken in response. https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
This attitude is extended when someone else asks a question about evidence, instead of replying to the question, the moderator sarcastically calls out the commentor for posting in the sub for the first time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
The moderator conflates questions about evidence and requests for more details as "making demands" https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
Its unusual and arguably suspicious because this attitude is antithetical to the stated point of the thread: To make a PSA to the community. They've also limited the comment section to only flaired users, which seems quite unusual given that this thread is ground-zero for a newsworthy claim.
The craziest part is the guy asking even apologized, probably cause he was getting downvoted too much and actually cares about appeasing them.
Imagine the shame of blocking the spread of malware before attempting to appease somebody that’s falsely accusing of you hysterics.
Every day I wake up and shake my head that another mod on the internet did something without my, the Grand Regent of Online, say so
Here are my suppositions and questions:
The frontier labs feel free to use the path of least resistance to acquire more data. Currently, one of those paths must be archive.today. Proof of that is that an archive.is link is posted here on HN, for any news post, right? I certainly find those links useful.
So, now that we know that archive.today is the easiest path to paywalled data, is a threat actor, and can poison training data...
1. What is their valuation?
2. Will the labs stop using them? Is it even fair to assume that they are?
3. ... ?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...
Not sure if this post even qualifies to be on hacker news...its all rumors and any attempt to distill the incident to its facts is met with pushback.
This happens on HN too.
Edit: Not being able to down vote till 300 points is a good thing tho, does prevent new accounts being created just to down vote.
The problem isn't really the site, it's the people. People like smashing the up and down buttons on things they agree with and unfortunately a comment's score affects where it shows up on the page.
It might be useful for your own memory since you can decide that you trust what was written. IE you trust that when it was written, you agreed at the time that it was an accurate summary, and later you only have to trust your earlier self.
But "My ai said that the site said ~essentially~ this on this date." is useless for anything else.
But it suggests an interesting idea. Maybe if we had some ai equivalent of trusted vetted accountable court reporters who write down notes and draw sketches in rooms where cameras aren't allowed.
That is purely second-hand reporting that we more or less trust, partly because there is usually more than one of them from competing venues reporting on the same event, partly because they are people with something to lose if they are unfaithful or even merely inept, partly because the facts are ultimately vettable with some effort for those who really need to.
There's no such ai yet. Even if one exists that could do the job, there is no consensus or basis for it, for everyone to recognize it as a trustworthy source of second hand reporting. But maybe if there were more than one and operated by different camps, they could grow to become recognized as a valid source of info.
they are not great people.
so fucking strange that people are playing defense for that. even forgetting the DDoS part, people don't care that they are editing archived content? wild.
It also automatically redirects you to archive.today as backup if its own attempt fails.
Seems like undesirable behavior given this thread?
Archive.today's /o/ endpoint itself returned the instruction to redirect, not the original source URL. We observed this in more formal testing on October 28, 2026, at approximately 07:35 UTC.
The link's actual href on the archived version of the page was:
hxxps://archive.ph/o/jXv3A/https://schenklawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wan-v-o..."
As it happens, and this is quite common, use of archive.today was not necessry
https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wa...
No "bot protection"
Managing the client software's use of HTTP headers, Javascript and/or CSS works just fine
(ofc this is a risk with the Wayback Machine, who also has a policy for honoring takedown request. But the Internet Archive's board and executives are known people with reputations)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006#47100204
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
(This is why archives that bypass paywalls are particularly important. I wish we had more options here.)
I think there is a confusion of blogger with a registered journalist, who must follow journalist's (ethic) rules.