British auction house Christie’s has been targeted by a cyberattack that knocked its website offline during its marquee annual art auction week.

The attack, shared by Christie’s Chief Executive Officer Guillaume Cerutti on LinkedIn on Sunday, was described as a “technology security incident.” Pointing to the possible form of the attack, Guillaume wrote that they have made “proactive decisions” including taking the Christie’s website offline. The main reason a company would take systems offline would be to prevent the lateral internal spread of the attack — and the main form attack that moves laterally across a network is ransomware.

The attack resulted in Christie’s having to delay a rare watch sale in Geneva for one day while other auctions went ahead as scheduled.  Recorded Future reports that Christie’s has also created a temporary website that states that it was “looking to resolve this as soon as possible” and provides phone numbers and basic information about items that will be auctioned in the coming days.

While ransomware is an obvious suspect and the attack occurred before the actual auctions were scheduled to start, Jamie Boote, associate principal security consultant at Synopsys Software Integrity Group, believes that the attack could be related to the auctions themselves.

“Anywhere there is money somewhere on the internet, attackers have been exploiting vulnerabilities to their benefit,” Boote explained. “There’s even a class of exploits known as ‘eBay attacks’ where attackers used to exploit the five-minute account lock-out to freeze out other bidders from raising the prices on goods they wanted to win.”

He suggested that the attack may have been related to market manipulation. “In this case, availability could have a real-world impact on the prices of those auction items,” Boote added. “When speculating about why an attacker would want to do this, it’s possible that the attacker could be doing this for notoriety, or they could be seeking to lower the prices on certain lots by reducing [the] visibility of those items.”

Photo: Wikimedia Commons