British Library Slowly Recovers Following Cyberattack

Following a cyberattack on the British Library‘s digital systems last October, officials there have reported that key services are slowly being restored.

Roughly 1,000 digitized manuscripts can now be accessed online, including the Eadui Psalter (ca. 1012–23), which contains texts used by Medieval Benedictine monks, as well as an illustrated bestiary with additions from Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica dating to the late 12th century.

“The time it is taking us to bring our services back is an exact measure of the destructiveness of the original attack, which directly targeted our core computing infrastructure,” the library’s chief executive Roly Keating explained in July.

The hackers reportedly stole user data and employee details, according to the Financial Times. Images of library employees’ passports were released, and an auction for an undisclosed number of documents was held. The library told the Art Newspaper that it “has not made any payment to the criminal actors responsible for the attack, nor engaged with them in any way.”

The total cost of the attack is still unclear, but the estimated loss is around £1.6 million ($2.09 million).

“What does this mean for UK libraries? I would argue it means that most UK university libraries are currently at risk. As most have stripped their in-house systems team to the bone or got rid of tech staff entirely, library systems are largely outsourced creating vulnerability,” former systems librarian Simon Bowie questioned on social media.

These kinds of ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly commonplace among cultural institutions. The MFA Boston, the now-defunct Rubin Museum of Art in New York, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, as well as the auction house Christie’s, have all weathered similar ones in the past few years.