London’s world-famous British Museum was pressured to partially shut its doorways on the finish of final week, following a critical safety breach involving a former IT contractor.
As The Guardian reviews, police have been referred to as to the museum on Friday after a lately dismissed employee allegedly trespassed onto the museum web site and was in a position to shut down varied methods, together with the museum’s ticketing platform.
As a consequence, guests confronted important disruptions, with many unable to entry galleries and exhibitions which are often open to the general public.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed that it had been referred to as to the museum at 8:25pm on Thursday, following reviews that “a person entered the British Museum and brought about harm to the museum’s safety and IT methods.”
They confirmed {that a} man in his 50s had been arrested on suspicion of housebreaking and prison harm. He has since been bailed.
“An IT contractor who was dismissed final week trespassed into the museum and shut down a number of of our methods. Police attended and he was arrested on the scene,” a spokesperson for the British Museum advised the media on Friday. “We’re working laborious to get the museum again to being absolutely operational however with remorse our non permanent exhibitions have been closed immediately and can stay so over the weekend – ticket holders have been alerted and refunds supplied.”
The unexpectedly dramatic flip of occasions, at a museum usually recognized for its sedate environment, has raised issues concerning the safety at one among Britain’s best-known cultural establishments.
What has not been made clear is how an unauthorised particular person was in a position to acquire bodily entry to the pc methods. It’s thought-about good observe to revoke people’ entry – each bodily and digital – to methods after they depart the employment of an organization, by revoking passwords and taking away ID badges.
It is doable, in fact, that ID badges and key playing cards weren’t taken away from the IT contractor when he was dismissed, or that the museum was as an alternative relying upon much less safe methods of controlling entry to privileged areas – equivalent to a mixture keypad.
The one comfort is that it seems the suspect was caught within the strategy of inflicting the alleged harm whereas on the positioning itself. Though, in fact, it might have been a lot better if they’d not been in a position to acquire entry within the first place.
The British Museum says that it has initiated a radical evaluation of its safety protocols to forestall related assaults occurring sooner or later. These measures embody a overview of its entry controls and monitoring methods to make sure that solely authorised workers can enter delicate areas of the museum.
The museum says it is usually evaluating whether or not it must strengthen the cybersecurity measures it has in place to defend its IT infrastructure.
Taking the chance to overview its cybersecurity actually makes a variety of sense, because the British Museum is just not alone in going through challenges associated to cybersecurity.
In October 2023, the British Library – just like the British Museum, an iconic establishment that preserves and showcases an unlimited array of cultural heritage and data – was hit by a ransomware assault that’s estimated to have price it tens of millions of kilos and nonetheless impacts a few of its companies.
In gentle of such incidents, extra museums are investing in superior safety applied sciences and coaching for employees to recognise and mitigate potential dangers.
The British Museum is full of treasures from all over the world, however it’s going through rising stress to return artefacts taken from different international locations.
Essentially the most notable instance is the Parthenon Marbles, historical sculptures faraway from Athens by Lord Elgin within the early nineteenth century. For many years, Greece has been campaigning for his or her return.