British Library Pays A High Price To Recover From A Cyber Attack
The British Library, one of the world’s most renowned cultural institutions, will need to spend about 40 per cent of its financial reserves to recover from a crippling cyber attack. This attack hit one of the UK’s critical research institutions and has made the majority of its services inaccessible.
The London-based library holds nearly 170mn pieces of work ranging from books to sound recordings, was knocked offline in October 2023 after a serious ransomware attack.
Ordinarily, authors and other copyright holders receive annual payments from Public Lending Right fund, which is money earned by writers, illustrators and translators each time a book is borrowed. But not this year, as a result of the sever disruption to the British Library's systems.
Hackers published hundreds of thousands of stolen files online, including customer and personnel data, after the library refused to pay a £600,000 ransom. According to reports, it now faces spending about £6 million to rebuild its digital services, consuming a sizeable proportion of its £16.4m in unallocated reserves.
The British Library’s online catalogue remains unavailable. Physical sites are open, but users must wait while librarians run through logs and find items on shelves. Some of the library’s services are scheduled to return in the middle of January, including a reference-only version of its online catalogue.
The British Library paid £250,000 to the cyber security provider NCC Group to provide an initial response to the attack, according to procurement records.
A British Library spokesperson said: “The final costs of recovering from the recent cyber attack are still not confirmed... The library always maintains its own financial reserve to help address unexpected issues and no bids for additional funding have been made at this stage.”
Hacking group Rhysida claimed responsibility for the breach in November last year. It published some 573 gigabytes of the British Library’s data after selling 10 per cent of the files to anonymous bidders through its Dark Web page.
Rhysida became known to US authorities in 2023 and has links with Russian-affiliated Vice Society,
Museums in the US including the MFA Boston, the Rubin Museum of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art have experienced outages after a cyber attack hit a third-party technology services supplier that assists museums with both internal and customer-facing management systems.
The British Library’s service could remain down for more than a year, and the attack highlights the risks of a single institution playing such a dominant role in delivering essential services.
It remains unclear how long it will take before the institution, one of five legal deposit libraries in Britain entitled to a copy of each piece of published work in the UK, is fully operational.
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