Website defacements were supposed to be temporary. 2600 Magazine saved enough of them that the temporary damage became an archive.
Visit the 2600 Hacked Sites Archive
The surviving index is organized by month and year, with 1999 broken into February through December and a short run of entries from January 2000. Anything before February 1999 points into an older archive.
The January 2000 list alone includes captured incidents involving the Library of Congress, the Colombian government, the University of Limerick, id Software, and other targets.
Each entry is dated and labeled with the affected site.
That simple structure makes the page useful now in a way it probably was not intended to be when it was assembled.
At the time, a defacement was news, embarrassment, bragging rights, vandalism, political speech, or some mixture of those depending on who was involved. Years later, the archive is closer to a primary-source collection of how attackers presented themselves when they took over a public web page.
Security history is ugly by nature
A polished history of the Web tends to remember browsers, companies, standards, and successful products.
The defacement archive remembers something else: weak servers, compromised accounts, crude HTML, handles, slogans, arguments, jokes, ideological messages, and the visual language people used when they wanted everyone to know they had gotten inside.
The page itself is old enough to carry a 1995–2002 copyright notice and the navigation of an earlier 2600 site, complete with sections for Off The Hook, pay phones, meetings, HOPE, older features, and the magazine.
That framing matters. This is not a modern cybersecurity museum built after the fact. It is part of the same culture that was documenting these incidents while they were happening.
The archive does not need to endorse the intrusions to make them worth preserving. Temporary Web events are some of the easiest historical material to lose because the original administrator’s entire job was to erase the evidence from public view as quickly as possible.
2600 kept copies.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes pages like this because Internet history is not only the software that worked. The breakage, abuse, embarrassment, and repairs were part of the network too.
A lot of those incidents lasted hours.
The index has lasted decades.