In case you didn’t hear — on October 22, 2025, the Internet Archive, who host the Wayback Machine at archive.org, celebrated a milestone: one trillion web pages archived, for posterity.

Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle the organization and its facilities grew through the late nineties; in 2001 access to their archive was greatly improved by the introduction of the Wayback Machine. From their own website on Oct 21 2009 they explained their mission and purpose:

Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.

We were curious about the Internet Archive technology. Storing a copy (in fact two copies!) of the internet is no mean feat, so we did some digging to find out how it’s done. The best information available is in this article from 2016: 20,000 Hard Drives on a Mission. They keep two copies of every “item”, which are stored in Linux directories. In 2016 they had over 30 petabytes of content and were ingesting at a rate of 13 to 15 terabytes per day, web, and television being the most voluminous.

In 2016 they had around 20,000 individual disk drives, each housed in specialized computers called “datanodes”. The datanodes have 36 data drives plus two operating system drives per machine. Datanodes are organized into racks of 10 machines, having 360 data drives per rack. These racks are interconnected via high-speed Ethernet to form a storage cluster.

Even though content storage tripled over 2012 to 2016, the count of disk drives stayed about the same; this is because of disk drive technology improvements. Datanodes that were once populated with 36 individual 2 terabyte drives are today filled with 8 terabyte drives, moving single node capacity from 72 terabytes (64.8 T formatted) to 288 terabytes (259.2 T formatted) in the same physical space. The evolution of disk density did not happen in a single step, so there are populations of 2, 3, 4, and 8 T drives in the storage clusters.

We will leave you with the visual styling of Hackaday Beta in 2004, and what an early google.com or amazon.com looked like back in the day. Super big shout out to the Internet Archive, thanks for providing such an invaluable service to our community, and congratulations on this excellent achievement.

The FBI has issued a federal subpoena to domain registrar Tucows, demanding extensive billing and session records to unmask the anonymous operator of Archive.ph (Archive.is and Archive.today). The site, known for bypassing paywalls, is now the subject of an undisclosed criminal investigation.

Law enforcement authorities from over a dozen countries in Europe and North America have taken part in disrupting the activities of the Hive ransomware group, the U.S. Justice Department and Europol announced. Hive is believed to have targeted various organizations worldwide in the past couple of years, often extorting payments in cryptocurrency.

Captured Decryption Keys Helped Hive Victims Avoid Paying $130 Million in Ransom

Ransomware network Hive, which has had around 1,500 victims in more than 80 countries, has been hit in a months-long disruption campaign, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) revealed. A total of 13 nations participated in the operation, including EU member states, the U.K. and Canada.

Hive has been identified as a major cybersecurity threat as the ransomware has been used by affiliated actors to compromise and encrypt data and computer systems of government facilities, oil multinationals, IT and telecom companies in the EU and U.S., Europol said. Hospitals, schools, financial firms, and critical infrastructure have been targeted, the DOJ noted.

It has been one of the most prolific ransomware strains, Chainalysis pointed out, which has collected at least $100 million from victims since its launch in 2021. A recent report by the blockchain forensics company unveiled that revenue from such attacks has decreased last year, with a growing number of affected organizations refusing to pay the demanded ransoms.

According to the announcements by the law enforcement authorities, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) penetrated Hive’s computers in July 2022 and captured its decryption keys, providing them to victims around the world which prevented them from paying another $130 million.

Working with the German Federal Police and the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit, the Bureau has now seized control over the servers and websites that Hive used to communicate with its members and the victims, including the darknet domain where the stolen data was sometimes posted. FBI Director Christopher Wray was quoted as stating:

The coordinated disruption of Hive’s computer networks … shows what we can accomplish by combining a relentless search for useful technical information to share with victims.

The Hive ransomware was created, maintained and updated by developers while being employed by affiliates in a ‘ransomware-as-a-service’ (RaaS) double extortion model, Europol explained. The affiliates would initially copy the data and then encrypt the files before asking for a ransom to decrypt the information and not publish it on the leak site.

The attackers exploited various vulnerabilities and used a number of methods, including single factor logins via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), virtual private networks (VPNs), and other remote network connection protocols as well as phishing emails with malicious attachments, the law enforcement agencies detailed.

Do you expect police authorities around the world to dismantle more ransomware networks in the near future? Tell us in the comments section below.

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