A year-end message from the City Librarian about the impacts of the ransomware attack against TPL and our commitment to restoring services starting later in January 2024
Hello everyone,
With both gratitude and a heavy heart, I am writing to provide an update on the status of our services in the wake of the ransomware attack that occurred almost two months ago.
Firstly, I want to express our deepest appreciation for the outpouring of support we've received from the people of Toronto and beyond. Your understanding and support have been a source of strength for us during this challenging time.
While many library services continue to operate, the Library remains a crime scene as the investigation continues. We know that the personal information of our staff was stolen, and we continue to investigate the extent of the data breach with the support of cybersecurity experts.
The rise in data security and ransomware incidents affecting organizations dedicated to community well-being, including hospitals, school boards, and libraries like ours, is a disturbing reality. Public sector organizations are increasingly becoming targets, whether motivated by financial gain or sheer malice. In the case of public libraries, dedicated to equity, access to information, intellectual freedom and openness for all, this represents an attack on the very essence of civil society. This attack reminds us all to stay vigilant in the face of a danger that is unfamiliar to many of us. I encourage you to visit the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security for information, advice and guidance on this critically important issue.
While our library branches have remained open and many library services are available, some important services are not. For example, you haven’t been able to access your library account online to manage and place holds, and public computers and printing aren’t available. While for some this is an inconvenience, for many others it is much more than that. We know that we are the only access to technology for many of the most vulnerable in Toronto. Their loss of access to meet their daily needs has been especially challenging and concerning. We’ve also heard from students who rely on our computers for school work, from job seekers who rely on us to print their resume, and from people who use library computers to stay connected to family and friends back home. And we’ve heard from families, researchers and others, about how limited access to our physical collection of materials is making life harder and more expensive. It is heartbreaking to hear these stories, and the frustration is compounded when considering the reason for the disruption.
I assure you that we are working tirelessly to restore all services as quickly as possible. The complexity of the task, given our extensive network of 100 library branches, a multi-service data centre, and more than 5,000 staff and public computers, makes this task much more difficult and means we have to take a gradual and measured approach to protect and reinstate services.
Despite the challenges, our city has continued to make good use of library services since the cyberattack:
- Almost half a million physical materials have been borrowed, manually checked out by staff.
- In addition to this, the increased borrowing of ebooks, eaudiobooks and digital magazines has pushed us over 11 million digital checkouts in 2023, surpassing our goal for the year by almost one million.
- Close to 10,000 people have registered for a new library card.
- Torontonians continue to visit us in the branches and online to attend programs. This has been especially important for the city’s children and youth, who have participated in our many after-school programs, and have visited our Youth Hubs, which have remained open throughout.
This wouldn’t be possible without the dedicated work of library staff – from information technology experts and frontline staff in branches, to administration staff supporting library operations, and customer service representatives answering your questions and getting you the information you need; and to the many staff who will soon be processing the more than one million returned and newly purchased library materials, getting them ready for you once our circulation technology is reconnected to our network. To all of these talented and committed library staff, along with so many more, I extend my heartfelt thanks.
Our top priorities continue to be reinstating our website and public computers, with these services set to return gradually beginning later in January. It’s taking longer to reinstate our services than any of us would like, but we need to be extremely careful that we’re bringing everything back safely and doing everything we can to prevent future attacks.
Our services may look a little different when we first bring them back, but we will work to make them as clear and easy to use as possible. We will update tpl.ca as more information becomes available.
It’s a long road ahead but we are looking forward to a full return. Although these criminals have hurt us, they certainly have not deterred us from fulfilling our mission of providing free and equitable access to library services to meet the changing needs of the people of Toronto.
We are all looking forward to coming back stronger than ever in 2024. Until then, I sincerely thank you for your support and understanding and wish you a joyous and peaceful holiday season.
Vickery Bowles