Major US Museums Suffer Cyberattack Fallout

Several US arts institutions were rendered unable to display their collections online after a cyberattack struck a tech service provider used by the museums, theNew York Timesreports. Among those affected by the breach targeting Gallery Systems, which aids cultural institutions in managing internal documents and displaying works digitally, were the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the Rubin Museum of Art in New York; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Arlington, New York; and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Gallery Systems is said to have first become aware of the problem on December 28, when computers running its software became encrypted and no longer operable. Among the programs affected was eMuseum, which allows users to search online collections, and TMS, which hosts sensitive information such as donor names, loan agreements, provenance records, shipping information, and storage locations of artworks. Users of Gallery Systems who host their own databases, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, were not affected.RelatedWANG TUO WINS 2023 SIGG PRIZEALEXIS SMITH (1949–2024) The scale, nature, and duration of the attack on Gallery Systems are not yet known. Cyberattacks on cultural organizations, many carried out by ransomware groups seeking remuneration in exchange for retreat, have become more frequent, with London’s British Library, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and the Philadelphia Orchestra having been recently targeted.

“The objects in museums are valuable, but the information about them is truly priceless,” Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice told theTimes. “Often, generations of curators will have worked to research and document an artifact. If this information is lost, the blow to our knowledge of the world would be immense.”.