An $840 million art sale and other valuables were halted at Christie’s after a cyberattack disrupted their operations. Two very unusual items—a $35 million artwork by Vincent van Gogh and a bottle of wine—are going up for sale.
Anyone trying to see the lots on Christie’s website is now unable to do so because of a cyberattack that may have happened last week.
Attackers have been taking advantage of vulnerabilities to benefit from any online money, according to Jamie Boote, an associate principal consultant at Synopsys Software Integrity Group.
The auction industry has been the target of prior attacks. An exploit known as an “eBay Attack” would cause other bidders to be unable to raise the prices of things they want to win for five minutes by taking advantage of the account lock-out feature. This happened because eBay previously displayed the usernames of other bidders. Therefore, a hacker might get access by repeatedly entering the displayed username and an erroneous password, rendering the user unable to put bids.
The auction company has assured people that they can still accept bids over the phone and in person.
On Monday, Guillaume Cerutti, CEO of Christie’s, informed everyone about the assault via LinkedIn. Calling it a technology security incident, he said the business had procedures to deal with problems like this.
A rare collection of timepieces, including those formerly held by Michael Schumacher, a Formula One legend, will not be sold as soon as planned because of the attack. However, the auctions are still going forward, albeit certain events have been rescheduled.
Javvad Malik, the chief security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, suggested that enterprises frequently test their processes and recreate real-world attack scenarios to evaluate their resilience accurately. He reminded us that It is important to conduct tests not only on IT systems but also on the people and procedures they rely on.
