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The British Library is still facing the consequences of the cyber attack it suffered back in October, which left its online services inaccessible.
The London-based library is responsible for storing over 150 million items, 13.5 million of which are printed books, making it one of the largest libraries in the world.
The attack was claimed by the Rhysida ransomware group last year, which gave the library just a week to pay £600,000 (roughly A$1.14 million); otherwise, it said it would sell the data, which included passports and employment documents, to a third party.
“With just seven days on the clock, seize the opportunity to bid on exclusive, unique, and impressive data,” the ransomware group said on its leak site.
“Open your wallets and be ready to buy exclusive data.
“We sell only to one hand, no reselling, you will be the only owner.”
While the library admirably did not pay the ransom, it now faces a bill 10 times larger, with a clean-up cost expected to run them between £6 million and £7 million, according to an insider source speaking with The Financial Times.
This reportedly makes up roughly 40 per cent of the library’s reserves, which equates to £16.4 million.
The British Library has so far spent at least £250,000, which it paid to cyber security provider NCC group to initially tackle the incident.
Additionally, Rhysida published 573 gigabytes of the library’s data, selling 10 per cent of it to anonymous bidders.
At this stage, the British Library’s online offerings remain inaccessible, meaning only a small portion of its catalogue is available through physical sites. This also takes time, as librarians have the arduous task of searching for specific items.
The British Library’s systems could remain down for over a year, according to cyber intelligence experts.
“We do have these single points of failure in our economy and societies that we don’t really think about as being vulnerable,” Royal United Services Institute member Jamie MacColl told The Financial Times.
“It’s quite a useful wake-up call for thinking about critical national infrastructure.”
Some of the British Library’s services are expected to return to normal sometime this month, including a reference-only version of its online catalogue; however, it is unclear whether all systems will return to full functionality.
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