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At long last, the British Library has announced that it is finally restoring its key systems a year after it suffered a cyber attack that took it offline.
The British Library is one of the largest in the world, containing over 150 million items, 13.5 million of which are printed books.
In October last year, the website and online systems of the British Library suffered a major outage as the result of a cyber attack, which was claimed by the Rhysida ransomware gang.
The threat actor then listed data belonging to the British Library for sale later in the month.
The library was then plagued with massive clean-up costs and times, finding that its expenses could be between £6 million and £7 million, over 10 times the £600,000 Rhysida set the ransom at.
The total actual cost is unknown, but it’s estimated to be around £1.6 million so far.
While restoration began in January of this year, the British Library is now restoring its key systems.
In a blog post earlier this month, British Library CEO Sir Roly Keating reported that five services were being restored.
“This month marks the first anniversary of a criminal attack on the library, which, as we detailed in a report earlier this year, has affected almost every aspect of our public service. As our users and regular readers of this blog know only too well, the journey to recover full access to our collection and services has been challenging and sometimes frustrating,” said Keating.
“It’s reassuring, therefore, to be able to report that as of this week, with the reopening of the National Newspaper Building in Boston Spa – containing some 750 million pages of newspapers and periodicals dating back to the 18th century – we have now restored access to 100 per cent of the library’s printed collections that were available prior to the cyber attack.”
Keating said that remote ordering, access to the rest of the library’s physical collection, online learning resources, digitised manuscripts and electronic legal deposits were all being restored.
“Alongside all of this, we are also deep into planning the next phase of our recovery programme, which will take us into the new year,” added Keating.
“Areas of particular focus include our sound archive and our popular and much-missed Ethos resource of 600,000 digitised theses. There’ll be updates on these and more in subsequent blogs here.
“In the longer term, as I’ve mentioned previously, work continues to implement a new end-to-end platform for all our library services – a vital project which was already in planning before the attack and which will ultimately provide not just relief from the challenges of the past year, but a better and more integrated service than we were ever able to offer before.”
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