Smashing Security How to lose friends and DDoS people
27 snips
Feb 26, 2026 Paul Ducklin, an experienced cybersecurity writer and commentator, joins to dissect a bizarre archive service that allegedly weaponised its CAPTCHA to DDoS a blogger and tampered with archives, sparking Wikipedia to blacklist the site. They also cover a ransomware gang that accidentally corrupted victims' decryption keys, plus a zen pick of the week and a rant about terrible web form validation.
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Archive.today's Popularity And Use Cases
- Archive.today has been widely used by researchers and Wikipedia for over a decade as an alternative to archive.org.
- Graham explains Archive.today archives paywalled articles and is linked from 400,000 Wikipedia pages, making it popular among journalists and researchers.
Archive.today Allegedly Launched A DDoS Against A Blogger
- A Finnish blogger Janni Patokalio published a piece tracing breadcrumbs to Archive.today's possible operator, which later attracted wider journalistic attention.
- After renewed interest, Archive.today allegedly modified its CAPTCHA page to send search requests every 300ms toward Yanni's site, causing an effective DDoS.
Complaint, Email In Spam, Then DDoS Escalation
- The Archive.today webmaster first filed a complaint alleging defamation over Yanni's blog post and then sent an email asking for removal.
- Yanni missed the email because it went to his spam folder, and during the delay a DDoS began against his site.