Cambridge University Libraries has had its electronic legal deposit restored after a cyber-attack on the British Library two years ago disrupted access to online books and journals.

Although access has been restored, it is still limited to e-publications collected before October 2023, and the UK Web Archive is still unavailable.

As one of the UK’s five legal deposit libraries, the University Library (UL) is entitled to a digital copy of all electronically published works which are stored on the electronic legal deposit systems. The outages made all of these copies unavailable to students and researchers.

However, a cyber-attack on the British Library in October 2023 blocked access to a large number of e-books and e-journals. The attacks were conducted by the Russia affiliated hacker-group Rhysida, who had demanded a ransom of 20 bitcoin to restore services and return stolen data.

Despite this, a full scan of the collections of e-books and e-journals showed no signs of malware.

The attack had left the library without over ten million journal articles and nearly 800,000 books, maps, journals and music scores. At the time of the attack, UL representatives stated that they expected full restoration to take ‘several months’ before all records were available.

In February last year, the University faced a cyber-attack targeted at internet services across multiple UK higher education institutions. Anonymous Sudan, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) group, reportedly claimed responsibility.

In November, English students were targeted in a password-stealing scam, which deprived them access to their emails.