It's not all good news at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. The happy celebration of the gala of its 175th anniversary is now followed by the confirmation that, as this newspaper reported last week, the computer security of its internal server has been violated.And the institution has suffered an attempt at blackmail by criminals.
The management of the theater, whose board of trustees has met this Monday to, among other things, approve the 2022-23 season, confirms that the external company specialized in this type of attack continues to work on the reconstruction of the computer system – it has already recovered 70% – always prioritizing security and making sure that there are no external affectations, which is why it is proving very slow.
Robotic action
An impersonal website invited the theater to click on a link to know what is asked in exchange for not making the documents public
But the attack has a second part, and that is that the Liceu is being asked for money from an impersonal website in exchange for not making public the documents that were accessed during the intrusion. Documents that, according to the theater, are outside the financial department and do not affect either the sale of tickets or information from partners and representatives, but only internal material.
In the early hours of Sunday to Monday, a week ago, what could be a computer robot walked through a few computer files of the lyrical coliseum, including some folder of the general director, but according to the theater they found nothing of interest and did not get to take anything.
The Liceu automatically filed a complaint with the General Directorate of Police of Barcelona and communicated it to the Catalan Agency for the Protection of Dades. After which it was put in the hands of an operator who since that moment has been dedicated to meticulously cleaning the entire computer system of the institution.
Prudent reaction
"We have never come to click because the data they had access to is not sensitive," they report from the theater
This past Saturday, reports the general direction of the theater, a link appeared on the screen with a message from a website inviting them to click to see what was asked of them in exchange for not publishing, this Tuesday, the data they have in their possession. "We have never come to click because the data they had access to is not sensitive," they report from the theater.
The Liceu takes into account that often this is an operation that is done automatically, and the robot does not detect who has been bothering until the interested party clicks on said website and becomes reachable. But the threat to make tracked documents public is ineffective when they contain "nothing to hide."
The restoration of the internal operational service has conditioned the activity of the Liceu by not being able to access its files
The attack has relatively conditioned the activity of the Liceu, which has celebrated its anniversary gala without setbacks and is preparing for the Mozart Festival and for the presentation this Tuesday of the programming of its season. But it has done so by seeing limited access to its intranet and also to the annals, that is, the archives that have been fed for three years and that were so useful and necessary last week, in the context of celebrating the anniversary and reviewing the history of the institution.
The theater doesn't let its guard down but insists that both the ticketing service and the email server would be out of reach of pirates.
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