Why didn’t the British Library pay a ransom to cyber attackers?

‘They’ve turned one of our most important pieces of national infrastructure into an internet café,’ was how my friend Marcus, a scholar of early modern literature, put it to me, talking about the cyberattack that crashed the British Library at the end of last year. He’s not wrong. Since October, when a ransomware attack by the Rhysida criminal gang knocked all the library’s digital services offline, there really hasn’t been much more to the library’s Euston headquarters than a large airy building with a couple of expensive coffee shops.

The Integrated Catalogue, which is the means by which readers search the library’s vast collection and call books up from the stacks or down from its offsite storage in Boston Spa, has been offline for weeks. The same goes for the inter-library loans service and Public Lending Right (which administers the earnings authors get when their work is borrowed from lending libraries); as well as more specialist scholarly tools, such as the digitised versions of much of the library’s manuscripts collection and the English Short Title Catalogue, which is the most comprehensive index of pre-19th century printed materials in the language.