The National Palace Museum stores nearly 700,000 pieces of Chinese artifacts and artwork. Digital preservation has become a means to extend the longevity of these pieces. However, a recent leak has raised some concerns about the museum's cyber security measures.
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High quality image scans of priceless artifacts from Taiwan's National Palace Museum have been leaked and sold at cheap prices on a Chinese shopping platform.
The museum's Administrative-affairs Deputy Director Huang Yung-tai (黃永泰) confirmed the leak on Tuesday. Huang says the legislature tasked the museum with publicizing 40,000 images. But he says during the transfer process, a human error contributed to the leak.
A museum representative says the incident was not a hack. Instead, people took illegal screenshots and pieced together the images.
Over a quarter of the museum's art piece images were leaked from this incident. Some scans cost a mere NT$20, which is less than US$1. As of this recording, these high quality image scans can still be found and downloaded from Chinese search engines.
Huang says the museum's digital information department is responsible for handling the leak. He says the museum owns the intellectual property of these images, and administrators will try reaching out to vendors to stop them from selling more digital scans.
As for whether this incident indicates a deeper level of cyber security issues at the museum, Huang declined to comment.