Major Outage: British Library Suffers A Cyber Attack

Libraries across the UK  are facing attacks from cyber criminals and recently the British Library, the  national library, has had a technology outage that it revealed on Saturday 28th October after being hit by a cyber attack, which is affecting services online and its sites in London and Leeds. Access to the British Library website, as well as the catalogue and digital collections, is temporarily unavailable. 

The collection of items ordered on or after 27 October, new collection item orders via digital catalogues and reading room PCs are also inaccessible, it said. Reader registration is also unavailable.

The British Library said on Tuesday 31st October it had launched an investigation into the incident with the support of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and other cybersecurity specialists. In a statement the Library said “The British Library is experiencing a major technology outage, as a result of a cyber incident. This is affecting online systems and services, our website, and onsite services including our reading rooms. We are investigating the incident with the support of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and cyber security specialists.”

The library revealed that it was experiencing “technical issues” on Saturday on TwitterX,  and that it expected the issues “to continue for the next few days”. 

This is the latest is a number of large-scale attacks on British and other centres of research and education, including the University of Manchester in June and UWS in August.

The British Library is one of the largest libraries in the world. It holds more than 150m items, including 13.5m printed books and e-books, rare manuscripts, maps, stamps, sound recordings, photographs and music.

Over 11 million users visit the library's website annually, while more than 16,000 people use its collections daily onsite and online.

British Library:      NY Times:    Varsity:   Guardian:   Computer Weekly:      Bleeping Computer: 

Headtopics:     Infosecurity Magazine:

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