The Arts Council of Ireland has been unable to display its collection online since a cyberattack hit a prominent technological service provider that helps hundreds of cultural organisations show their works digitally.
According to a report in The New York Times, museum service provider, Gallery Systems, noticed a problem on December 28th, when computers running its software became encrypted and could no longer operate.
“We immediately took steps to isolate those systems and implemented measures to prevent additional systems from being affected, including taking systems offline as a precaution,” the company said in a message to clients.
“We also launched an investigation and third-party cybersecurity experts were engaged to assist. In addition, we notified law enforcement.”
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The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas were among the institutions confirming that their systems have experienced outages in recent days. Other clients of Gallery Systems were unaffected by the outage as they host their own databases.
A spokesman for the Arts Council of Ireland said due to the recent disruption with the Gallery Systems software, its collection platform on eMuseum has been “down for a few days”.
“This unfortunately means the public can’t engage with our collection online at present, but we are working with the team at Gallery Systems to resolve this and anticipate things being back up and running soon,” the spokesman said.
“No other aspects of our work have been affected.”
The Arts Council has been buying art from working artists since 1962, which seeks to tell the story of modern and contemporary Irish visual art.
The collection, which continues to grow, is comprised of more than 1,340 artworks including sculpture, painting, performance, print, video, installation, photography and other works many of which are on display in public spaces all over Ireland.
Members of the public are normally able to view the collection on the council’s emuseum site but the page is down as a result of the cyber attack.
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