Christie’s website hit by major cyberattack hours before huge auction
Auction house forced to set up alternative solutions
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Iconic auction house Christie’s was forced to set up an entirely new website for live auctions after its main domain was brought down by a highly disruptive cyberattack.
The company’s website shut down on Thursday night, a few days before it was planning on auctioning roughly $840 million worth of art. At press time, the website was still offline, with a temporary site being propped up in its place.
On this new site, Christie’s left this message for its visitors: “We apologize that our full website is currently offline. We are looking to resolve this as soon as possible and regret any inconvenience.”
Proceeding as planned
While the outage might be the result of a cyberattack in which hackers may have even stolen data, it’s worth mentioning that this might also have been a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Until Christie’s comes forward with more details, however, we can only speculate on the cause.
As the company’s IT team wrestles with the incident, a new site was set up to help facilitate upcoming auctions:
“Looking ahead, we are pleased to confirm all our live auctions this week will take place as scheduled, with the exception of the Rare Watches sale in Geneva that we postponed by one day to tomorrow, 14th May,” the company said in an updated statement.
“Our marketing teams have designed and built a new website environment to host content for our live auctions including sales information, catalogs and essays. Our Christie’sYouTubechannel is also available with virtually all our video content for this week’s Luxury and 20/21 sales, as well as our other social media channels. While our usual website remains offline, our clients will be able to bid securely in person, on the phone, by absentee bid and online via Christie’s LIVE.”
Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
ViaThe Register
More from TechRadar Pro
Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.
This new phishing strategy utilizes GitHub comments to distribute malware
Should your VPN always be on?
Anker Nebula Mars 3 review: A powerful and truly portable projector
