Archive Team: a Distributed Preservation of Service Attack

Architecture and Background

Jason Scott - Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack For the last few years, historian and archivist Jason Scott has been involved with a loose, rogue band of data preservation activists called The Archive Team.

Vulnerability Analysis

As major sites with brand recognition and the work of millions announce short-notice shutdowns of their entire services, including Geocities, Friendster, and Yahoo Video, Archive Team arrives on the scene to duplicate as much as they possibly can for history before all the data is wiped forever.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

To do this, they have been rude, crude and far outside the spectrum of polite requests to save digital history, and have used a variety of techniques to retrieve and extract data that might have otherwise been unreachable.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

Come for the rough-and-tumble extraction techniques and teamwork methods, stay for the humor and ranting. Jason Scott is a computer historian, archivist, documentary filmmaker and essayist dedicated to saving digital history and having a blast doing it. Between his sites TEXTFILES.COM, ARCHIVETEAM.ORG and a propensity for saying a lot of stuff to a lot of people, he's done his best to ensure entire lengths of computer and hacker history have been preserved and not forgotten. This will be his 198th DEFCON.