Holistic Auction

Cybersecurity of the art market is increasingly becoming a critical problem

According to the “Hiscox Online Art Trade Report”, the fraction of online platforms on the art market that had concerns about falling victim to hackers and cybercriminals grew to 48% in 2021 against 37% in 2020 and only 22% in 2019.

Foto: How concerned are you about cyber (e.g. email phishihg scams and fraudulent use of data)? (%) Source: Hiscox Online Art Trade Report

The appearance of COVID-19 has led to an increasing number of participants in the world art market beginning to work online and, often in a hurry, transferring their business into a digital format. The fact that criminals are able to take advantage of vulnerabilities to commit crimes worries a lot of people. High-profile cases of theft of large sums when making deals are constantly becoming public domain.

Participants in the art market fall victim to cybercriminals for a variety of reasons:

• Small organisations are not able to ensure the necessary level of security independently;
• The large sums involved in deals are attractive to hackers;
• Often correspondence is done over weakly secured communication channels - through e-mail or WhatsApp;
• Financial documents and bills are sent in PDF format and can easily be intercepted and falsified.

In this way, the art market still falls behind other luxury markets, where payments are usually transferred through specially designed electronic commerce platforms and the necessary level of security is provided.

Source: Artsy

Evgeniy Saunin, 22 July 2022, 19:00