Scourge · October 28 2023

The Scourge of the British Library

Chronicle

On Saturday 28 October 2023 the Rhysida gang encrypted or destroyed much of the British Library's servers, at one of the largest libraries in the world. The Library refused to pay a ransom of 20 bitcoin, and the attackers leaked about 600 GB of data. The online catalogue and many reader services stayed down for months. In March 2024 the Library published an unusually candid incident review, which named outdated IT among the causes.

Lesson learned

The review became required reading for anyone running old systems: it showed how much postponing modernisation costs and how valuable it is to describe openly what went wrong.

Prayer of reparation

O Rhysida, who shut the doors of learning for months, give the catalogues back to the readers and teach us that technical debt, sooner or later, charges interest. Amen.

How it is remembered

Remembered by modernising outdated systems in good time, requiring MFA for third-party remote access and writing, after an incident, an honest review others can learn from.