The library said it “weathered the cyber-attack” without payment

In a story reported by The Guardian, “ransomware gangs have been warned that there is no money in attacking the British state” after the British Library reported that it has not made a single payment to the criminal group.

When did the original incident happen?

The library suffered a cyber-attack on October 2023

UK government has a strong stance on cybercriminals and the National Cyber Security Centre, a GCHQ subsidiary, is “focusing increased efforts on deterring ransomware attacks before they happen, in part by cutting off the flow of funds,” according to The Guardian.

A spokesperson for the British Library, said: “The library has not made any payment to the criminal actors responsible for the attack, nor engaged with them in any way.”

Services at the library are still not running at full capacity. It is known that 600GB of data was stolen and after no payment was made, the information was dumped onto the dark web.

The British Library continues: “While we have secure copies of all our digital collections – both born-digital and digitised content, and the metadata that describes it – we have been hampered by the lack of viable infrastructure on which to restore it.”