iscover
Share this article on:
Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
The British Library has taken a major step towards recovery from the cyber attack it suffered last year, announcing that its main catalogue will finally be restored.
The attack on the library occurred in October last year, leading to major outages across the library’s services. This was quickly claimed by the Rhysida ransomware group, which posted a screenshot of sample data and listed stolen data available for auction, giving the library a week to pay a ransom of £600,000 (roughly AU$1.14 million).
Now, almost three months after the incident, the British Library has said that its main database, which contains 36 million records, is being restored.
“As we begin a new year, I’m pleased to confirm that – as promised before Christmas – next Monday, 15 January, will see the return online of one of the most important datasets for researchers around the world: the main British Library catalogue, including details of our printed books, journals, maps, music scores and rare books,” wrote library chief Sir Roly Keating, adding that there will be some difficulties as the restored data is in read-only mode.
“When the catalogue returns, it won’t be in quite the form that longstanding users will be familiar with. Most notably, it will be ‘read-only’, so although you will be able to search for items as before, the process for checking availability and ordering them for use in the reading rooms will be different.”
In addition, Keating said it will also be restoring access to the “majority of the library’s key special collections”, which include unique items such as archives and manuscripts. At this stage, these will only be accessible onsite and offline.
While Keating iterates that this marks the first time since the incident that the majority of the physical items at its St Pancras site will be accessible by readers, the full clean-up process could take over a year.
“Positive as this news is, it’s important to stress that there are many further steps ahead. The broader programme of full technical rebuild and recovery from the attack will take time, and we’re keen to listen to our users and the wider research community to ensure we get the priorities right in the months ahead,” added Keating.
Keating also addressed the impact the outage had on researchers and authors, delaying studies and restricting payments.
“It’s also important, as we enter this crucial new phase of recovery, to say that we are sorry that for the past two months, researchers who rely for their studies and, in some cases, their livelihoods on access to the library’s collections have been deprived of it,” added Keating.
“We are sorry that for all our efforts, we were not able to protect some personal data belonging to our users and our staff from being leaked by these hackers.”
Keating said the British Library is currently establishing workaround systems to ensure that payments will be made to authors by “at the latest, the statutory deadline at the end of March”, saying that a timeline for the payments will be released at the end of the month.
Be the first to hear the latest developments in the cyber industry.
