Christie's Auctions Knocked Offline
The prestigious art and sales auction house Christie's that attempts to sell art and other items worth an estimated £670m is being hit by a cyber attack that has stopped the on-line sale of art.
The main website has not been fully reinstated almost a week after the incident and a ransomware exploit against Christies' seems a likely cause of the extended outage
Art and items ranging from a Vincent van Gogh painting, valued at $35m, to rare wine are going under the hammer in its spring auctions. Potential buyers were unable to review sales items on its website because it was offline. Consequently,the sale of a collection of rare watches, including some owned by Formula 1 star, Michael Schumacher, has been delayed.
The outage began recently, but the historic auction house was still able to hold a charity auction for watches in Geneva, which was itself postponed from its original 2023 date. The Only Watch auction raised 28m Swiss Francs (£26.4m) to accelerate research into Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Christie's New York auctions will begin again soon with the sale of works owned by art collector Rosa de la Cruz, to be followed by art collections spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century art collection, itself valued at $500m, includes art by Pablo Picasso, Georgia O'Keefe and Andy Warhol.
While people cannot use its website, they will still be able to bid online using its Christie's Live service and the auction items remains accessible through a hurriedly arranged alternative backup website provided by Christie’s.
The temporary site was set up which the main Christie’s web page redirects to and has a message to customers apologising for the inconvenience, but provides no further detail on the cause of the attack.
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Image: Ideogram
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