The British Library's catalog is finally back online, more than two months since the historic library's website suffered a ransomware attack.
People will be able to access the library's main catalog, a collection of 36 million books, journals, maps, newspapers, and more, starting Jan. 15 in "read-only" format.
The offline version of the catalogs are currently unavailable and currently only accessible in The British Library's physical facility in London.
It is uncertain when will the library be back to its former operational self.
The Financial Times earlier reported that the library would need to exhaust 40% of its reserves, or up to £7 million ($8.87 million) to fully recover from the cyberattack.
The British Library Takes a Huge Hit from Hackers
The British Library's tech outage was one of the largest cyber attacks reported last year as customer and employee data were leaked to the dark web.
The library's online portal also went down for almost a month while its on-site technologies suffered an outage, including the public Wi-Fi and computers.
Rhysida, the cybercrime group responsible for the attacks, demanded a ransom of £600,000 ($761,082) for the stolen 490,191 files.
The British Library did not pay Rhysidia's demands. The library, along with the Metropolitan Police and the National Cyber Security Centre, are still investigating the attack.
Cyberattacks on the Rise in Europe
Ransomware hackings and other forms of cyberattacks have been increasing across major sectors in Europe with Rhysida placed among the top perpetrators.
The Russian-affiliated group made its name known in 2023 after attacking King Edward VII's Hospital in London and the state-owned China Energy Engineering Corporation.
The group has been reported to be a combination of vulnerability abuse and deception, impersonating a legitimate "cybersecurity team" to steal security data from institutions.
Cybersecurity groups and government agencies have since started bolstering their defenses against cybercriminals as investigations to identify the perpetrators continue.
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