£7 million impact of British Library cyber attack

It’s going to cost the British Library an estimated £7 million – about 40 per cent of its reserves – to recover from a devastating hacking incident. For two and a half months, the library’s vast online catalogue has been unavailable as it struggles to recover from a ransomware attack. In late October, the Rhysida hacking group stole a massive 573 gigabytes of the library’s data in a type of attack known as a double extortion. When the library refused to pay a £600,000 ransom, Rhysida published hundreds of thousands of the stolen files online – including customer data. The British Library has a copy of every book ever published in Britain; its special collection includes Jane Austen’s childhood notebooks and the original Beowulf manuscript. Some of its physical sites are still open, but much of its archive remains inaccessible and it could be over a year before it’s fully operational again. “It does feel like an attack on the free sharing of knowledge,” says Max Long, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge. “At least we can rest assured in the knowledge that a cyber attack can’t steal the physical books.”