Hacker News

points by mahboi 1 day ago | 0 comments

Version that doesn't require login: https://reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetoday_l...

I'm confused though, it says the site injected malware into its archived form. But the HN title says archive.today injected the malware.

[–] dpark 1 day ago

You said the same thing twice. “The site” == archive.today

The claim is that archive.today is injecting malware into archived pages. Given some of the past behavior, this is not hard to believe.

[–] LoganDark 1 day ago

The archive.today site is the one injecting the malware, not the site being archived.

[–] mahboi 1 day ago

"It was discovered by a member of the mod team today that an article archived by archive.today had injected malware links into the archived article."

Idk, maybe this is just a typo, but grammatically this is saying the article injected the links.

[–] k00shball 1 day ago

Go to https://archive.ph/jXv3A#selection-5079.208-5079.212 Click on "Filed on Tuesday" and it will redirect you to a site telling you to download something.

(To be fair, that isn't the only redirect so you might need to click it a few times.)

[–] deepfriedrice 1 day ago

It immediately stands out that that link is to a /wp-content URL. AKA wordpress. AKA PHP. AKA very recently vulnerable (and perhaps still)...

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.

[–] mahboi 1 day ago

Thanks, that's pretty much all I was looking for. Was able to reproduce but then started getting 429s.

[–] opello 1 day ago

I reproduced it too but was hoping to get a log, now all I get is 429 as well.

Just for the sake of preserving what I did see, the URL linked in the text was:

    https://archive.ph/o/jXv3A/https://schenklawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wan-v-openai-complaint.pdf

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...

[–] mahboi 1 day ago

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:

  curl 'https://archive.ph/o/jXv3A/https://schenklawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wan-v-openai-complaint.pdf' \
  --compressed \
  -H 'User-Agent: [redacted]' \
  -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' \
  -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9' \
  -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd' \
  -H 'Connection: keep-alive' \
  -H 'Cookie: [redacted but you dont need it actually]' \
  -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' \
  -H 'Sec-Fetch-Dest: document' \
  -H 'Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate' \
  -H 'Sec-Fetch-Site: cross-site' \
  -H 'Sec-Fetch-User: ?1' \
  -H 'Priority: u=0, i' \
  -H 'TE: trailers' \
  -H 'Pragma: no-cache' \
  -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' -v

[–] opello 1 day ago

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?

[–] stavros 1 day ago

I think they meant it as in "an article archived by archive.today had malware links injected into the archived article."