Wikipedia officially blacklists all links to Archive Today over bizarre DDOS attack and manipulated archives — website operator caught tweaking their own archive
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Subscribe to our newsletter
A few days ago, we covered an eyebrow-raising bit of news about the operator(s) of Archive Today leveraging their website to allegedly execute a denial-of-service attack against Jani Patokallio, a security blogger. At the time, Wikipedia considered dropping all links to Archive Today (AT), a decision argued for and against in open discussion. That decision has quickly been made final thanks to AT altering its own archived pages to fuel its feud.
Specifically, AT's maintainers reportedly tweaked snapshots of a third-party blog post that Patokallio referred to in his February 2026 article about the DDoS attack. AT changed the name of a "Nora" person in said post to Jani Patokallio, making it look as if he had written some comments there. Eagle-eyed Wikipedia editors spotted the alterations, which have since then been reverted, but the action made it easy for them reach a final decision.
Now that it's time for Wikipedia to replace all AT links, editors have three options: replace with the original source if it's still online, use a different archive site, or change the source to media that doesn't require an archive, like a print. It's not all roses, though, as besides the man-hours involved, an estimated 15% of links were irreplaceable.
The original reason for the attack was a 2023 post where Patokallio dug into how Archive Today operates, and in the process tried figuring out the identify of the site's operator(s). Said person or persons took umbrage to the post after nearly three years, and allegedly decided to add code to Archive Today and its aliases, opening Patokallio's site in the background in an attempt to overwhelm/DDOS the blog.
Since Wikipedia reportedly has 695,000 links to Archive Today spread across 400,000 pages, it meant that anyone clicking on the links would score one hit on Patokallio's website. For his part, in a statement to Ars Technica , he said "[he's] glad the Wikipedia community has come to a clear consensus, and [hopes] this inspires the Wikimedia Foundation to look into creating its own archival service."
This turn of events is ultimately a loss for everyone involved, as Archive Today is speedy, reliable, and has top-notch scraping quality. An archive has little use if its contents can't be 100% trusted, though.
Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
