If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

  • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
    16·
    4 hours ago

    From Wikipedia

    As of 13:27, 19 February 2026 (UTC), the owners are now batch-replacing certain names in archived pages with the real name of the gyrovague.com webmaster as a form of harassment.

    The top piece of evidence (not in any special order) was redacted due to “revealing personal information”.

    Other subsequent pieces of evidence were retained but names were replaced with abbreviations

    I have another evidence of tampering: this is a Megalodon archive of a archive.ph archive of a post. The original post is now dead. Patokallio mentions this post in his blog – he would surely mention if the post mentioned him, in the way the archived version does. He quoted the original [N.P.] was a woman[…], while the archive.ph reads Jani Patokallio was a woman[…]

    Another example:

    Sometime today, Archive.today replaced the name with the equivalent amount of spaces (only where N…'s name used to be). Ironically, “Jani Patokallio” is of the same length as “N…”.