ICO: No Additional Motion on British Library Ransomware Breach

The UK’s knowledge safety regulator has mentioned it won’t press on with an investigation into the British Library’s catastrophic ransomware breach.

The October 2023 attack by a Rhysida ransomware affiliate led to the theft of 600GB of inside knowledge, together with personally identifiable info (PII) on customers and employees, which was put up on the market after which revealed on the darkish internet.

The group was additionally capable of encrypt vital knowledge and methods and destroy some servers to disrupt system restoration and protect its anonymity.

The library, which is a government-sponsored public physique, claimed in March 2024 that losses because of the breach had already reached £1.6m ($2.1m). It’s now working by an 18-month “renew” part – constructing new IT infrastructure by upgrades, diversifications and new expertise purchases.

Nonetheless, the Data Commissioner’s Workplace (ICO) mentioned in an announcement yesterday that its time could be higher served elsewhere, fairly than to analyze whether or not punitive motion is important.

“Having rigorously thought-about this specific case, the knowledge commissioner determined that, because of our present priorities, additional investigation wouldn’t be the best use of our sources,” it famous.

“We’ve supplied steering to the British Library, which has reassured us about its dedication to proceed to evaluation and make sure that applicable safety measures are in place to guard individuals’s knowledge.”

The choice is more likely to have been made for a number of causes: a scarcity of ICO sources, an ongoing “public sector strategy” which tends to favor session over penalties for public our bodies, and the library’s in depth postmortem report on the assault.

“Following the incident, the British Library revealed a cyber incident evaluation in March 2024, which supplied an outline of the cyber-attack and key classes learnt to assist different organizations which will expertise comparable incidents,” the ICO famous in its assertion.

“We commend the British Library for being open and clear about its system vulnerabilities that contributed to the incident, the influence it has had, and the enhancements made to this point to guard individuals’s private info.”

Time to Rebuild

That 18-page report lays naked the challenges going through organizations which have to attenuate threat throughout a possible massive cyber-attack floor.

It’s unclear precisely how the menace group gained preliminary entry to the library’s IT community, though compromise of privileged account credentials is most definitely. Nonetheless, the shortage of multi-factor authentication (MFA) on an administrator account enabled the ransomware actors to escalate their assault, the ICO mentioned.

The report highlighted the significance of upgrading to cloud-based methods. Whereas the British Library’s cloud-based e mail, finance, HR and payroll methods had been undamaged, its on-premises methods fared far worse.

Amongst different issues, it has resolved to: