The British Library, the most complete library in the world, begins to recover from the largest cyber attack in its history

The butterfly effect of the largest cyberattack ever suffered by a public library flutters in London, bounces in Melbourne and explodes in Rome.

This is what Flavia Marcello, a professor of Architectural History at the Swinburne University of Technology, has felt. She is an Australian of Italian descent, married to a British man, and who, like the bears, travels to the capital of the United Kingdom for a month every year to fill yourself with knowledge and “hibernate” and digest it for the rest of the year.

More information

The British Library releases more than a million images on the internet

This time it has been different.

“My friends already warned me about the tragedy at the British Library (BL), so I decided to put aside my subject of study and focus on other topics.

Most of the time I have been working in the archives of the Royal Institute of British Architects,” Marcello explains to EL PAÍS.

On October 31, the management of the British public library admitted for the first time that it had suffered a devastating computer attack.

Its

online

catalog , with nearly 36 million books and up to 170 million documents and historical objects, had been completely destroyed.

The access system for readers and researchers of the library, unusable.

Extortion attempt

Rhysida, a strange

ransomware group

,

is

attributed

the authorship of the attack.

Ransomware

is a combination between

malware

and

ransom

;

that is, malicious

software

that alters the system, whose authors demand a ransom to restore normality.

They have already carried out similar attacks against educational, health or government institutions.

They even managed

to hack

the Chilean army.

The British press has indicated that the amount claimed from the BL was around 700,000 euros.

“A crude attempt at extortion,” Roly Keating, executive director of the library, has defined it.

“Our experience over the last two months has highlighted a great paradox for all those institutions that work with human knowledge, in the digital age,” said Keating – reluctant to speak to the press – in the blog with which he goes. updating information regarding cyber attacks.

“Our commitment to transparency, free access and the exhibition of documents implies the need to embrace all the fantastic possibilities that technology offers us;

But as guardians of our collection we also face the growing challenge of protecting our digital heritage from possible attacks,” he says.

Illumination of a book by the doctor Aldebrandín of Siena (13th century), which is part of the collection of the British Library.British Library / Getty Images

A protection with little success, as has been demonstrated.

For almost three months, BL users have not been able to access their digital services, nor have they even been able to use the catalog so that library staff could get them what they needed.

Paralyzed research, paused studies, inability to properly document conferences or presentations.

“I am a regular reader, and I need to come often to prepare my talks and classes,” explains William White, professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire, specializing in 17th-century Britain.

“With the usual system, you requested the material from the office or from home, through the BL website, and they promised to have it prepared within a maximum period of 70 minutes,” he says.

Many of these books or documents are very precious.

In the library there are reading rooms that can be accessed with an accredited pass, once all personal belongings have been deposited in a transparent bag to avoid damage to the material or theft.

Only since last Monday has some normality been restored.

Users can consult the catalog of works again in the same building, and the BL staff searches it for them.

It is still impossible to make a prior request from abroad.

And the material archived at the Boston Spa headquarters in Yorkshire (northern England) cannot yet be requested.

The London library building, in King's Cross, was at the time the largest construction in volume carried out in the city in the 20th century.

It soon proved insufficient.

The expansion of Boston Spa, 200 miles away, alleviated the lack of space.

More a logistics warehouse, such as those of the Amazon company, than a symbolic building, its 746 kilometers of shelves and the system it has for robotic search of books, documents and objects have relieved the pressure that researchers and scholars from all over the world exerted on the British library.

Italian snipers

Marcello is a specialist in Italian architecture of the fascist period.

His latest obsession is the statue dedicated to the

bersaglieri

, in the Roman square of Porta Pia.

Bersagliere

means “sharpshooter”.

They made up an infantry unit that deployed quickly and agilely.

They rode bicycles everywhere and wore wide-brimmed hats with grouse feathers.

Worshiped as a symbol of the feat of Italian unification, the dictator Benito Mussolini sponsored this statue, so beloved, however, by the Romans.

“Something similar must have happened in Spain with Franco's monuments, right?” asks the specialist.

“It is incredible the number of books and documents on the

bersaglieri

that it has

the Department of History and Humanities of the BL.

That's why I was very interested in coming this year, but I'm almost ready to return to Australia.

Do you know that they even keep one of the first copies of the Bersagliere March

on hand ?

The bad thing is that you have to travel to Boston Spa to see it,” says the Australian historian while humming the devilish military anthem.

Beginning of the eleventh scene of the second act of 'Orlando' in the autograph manuscript of George Frideric Handel (1732), preserved in the British Library.THE BRITISH LIBRARY

Patent documents, stamps, musical recordings, maps, scores, newspapers, magazines, diaries, film scripts, photographs, letters... The BL's collections are not limited to books.

Much of that material had been digitized, for easy access.

Today, for the moment, it remains out of the reach of researchers.

The library houses a Jane Austen desk, a Beethoven tuning fork, one of the first copies of Homer's

Iliad

, or the manuscript with lyrics of

Yesterday

by the Beatles.

Personal and economic damages

A month after its attack on the

dark web

- the deep web, which can only be accessed with specialized browsers - the Rhysida group began publishing personal data of BL workers and its users, upon verifying that the library did not agreed to pay the ransom.

The management contacted the partners and researchers by email to warn them of the situation.

But the damage to the system has been enormous, and it couldn't even make it easier for users to change their password.

He simply asked those who used it in other libraries connected to the BL to replace it.

Nearly 20,000 authors, whose works are part of the library's collection, were charged 13 pence each time a user borrowed one of their books, up to a maximum of about 7,700 euros per year.

Payments have been suspended until today, while system repairs continue.

The

Financial Times

newspaper has even suggested that the return to normality will cost just over eight million euros, although the director of the BL has indicated that it is still too early to make that calculation.

While online

services are slowly getting back on track

, London's Metropolitan Police and the National Cyber ​​Security Center are investigating an attack that has significantly damaged the institution's prestige, and has become a serious warning for public libraries around the world. .

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