Sei mesi dopo l'attacco informatico, la British Library non è più la stessa cosa (Six months after the cyber attack, the British Library is no longer the same) | Il Post

translated w. Google Translate

by Viola Stefanello

Just a stone's throw from St. Pancras International train station, on Euston Road in central London, is a giant brutalist red-brick building. It was built between the Seventies and Nineties, in the space that had once been a freight yard. It is the headquarters of the British Library, the most well-stocked public library in the world together with the American Library of Congress. Its collection is made up of over 150 million items, including books, maps, copies of newspapers and magazines, legal documents, stamps, degree theses, photographs, and an enormous quantity of audio and video media and files. They are not all stored on Euston Road, on the contrary: 70 percent are in a gigantic former munitions factory between Leeds and York. In normal times, there are vans that ply to St. Pancras once a day to ensure that readers get the materials they require within 48 hours. At the British Library, however, these are not normal times. Almost seven months ago, on 28 October, the institution was hit by a particularly destructive cyber attack: the criminal group Rhysida had asked for 20 bitcoins (then around 700 thousand euros) from the library to avoid the publication of 490 thousand personal data that it had stolen, and when he didn't get them he published lots of them online, putting employees and users in difficulty. But above all, during the attack it irreparably damaged the rather dated computer system on which most of the library's services were based to obscure the traces of its attack. From one day to the next, all the resources that were in some way linked to the library's IT system - the website, the digital collections, various databases, even the POS used in the shop at the Euston Road branch - stopped working.

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