London’s National Gallery Hit With 2 Million Attacks

The National Gallery, one of London’s most popular art museums based in Trafalgar Square was hit with a staggering 1,875,250 email cyber-attacks last year. The gallery, which attracts over five million visitors every year, was hit by an astonishing total of 1,875,250 email cyber-attacks in 2019. These came in a variety of forms, including spam and virus attempts.

This is according to official figures obtained by Absolute Software, the cyber security specialists and leader in endpoint resilience. Absolute Software obtained the information via a Freedom of Information request. The figures displayed the lengths cyber-criminals went to try and steal the personal and financial data of members of the major tourist attraction.

 “It’s clear that cyber-criminals are mastering the art of malicious email attacks, designed to infiltrate the National Gallery and steal confidential data.... With millions of visitors every year and tens of thousands of members, it’s vital that London’s leading tourist hotspots have the right systems in place to protect devices from infiltration.” said Andy Harcup of  Absolute Software, 

The National Gallery, which is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, prevented a wide range of sophisticated attacks from reaching their destination. The gallery's online security team successfuly blocked email addresses software was able to quarantine 1,176,656 different attack attempts, while its detection software blocked 18,378 spam emails and 443,741 attempted connection emails. 

A further 179,844 emails were stopped under the category of anti-spoofing lockout and 10,959 were registered as manual envelope rejection. Another 2810 emails were blocked under the category of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
“With many major museums now closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s critical that enterprises have full visibility of the assets allocated to remote workers as well as always having control of those assets in case of the need to take action,” added Harcup.

The National Portrait Gallery, another one of London’s most prestigious art galleries, was targeted by 347,602 emails containing spam, phishing and malware attacks in the final quarter of 2019, according to official figures and this data underlines the threat posed to the capital’s museums by malicious hackers who are intent on stealing membership data from tourist hotspots.

Of the 347,602 blocked email attacks, 56 per cent (194,620) were identified as Directory Harvest Attacks (DHA).
A DHA is an attempt to determine the valid e-mail addresses of employees or individuals associated with an organisation’s server so that they can be added to a spam database. Additionally, 61,710 emails were blocked as the sender belonged to a ‘threat intelligence blacklist’.

In 2017, London art dealers were defrauded out of hundreds of thousands of pounds after hackers successfully breached company email accounts to monitor correspondence between clients.  The incident resulted in fresh cyber security guidance being issued by the Society of London Art Dealers, as well as tips for avoiding email fraud.

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