Investigative officials yesterday visited the National Palace Museum to review its handling of a data leak involving high-
resolution images of artifacts that appeared for sale on Chinese e-commerce platforms last year, as the museum said the leak was due to administrative error and not hacking.
Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) yesterday confirmed the leak in response to a question by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) at a question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei.
Photo: Lu Chun-wei, Taipei Times
The museum yesterday issued a statement saying that after discovering the leak in June last year, it launched an administrative investigation, which wrapped up on Jan. 3.
The museum said that after opening its digital archives to the public, an employee surnamed Lin (林) at the museum’s digital information division began converting files to a low-resolution format using self-developed software for digital archiving.
However, the museum’s servers were overloaded due to the huge amount of data being processed, and as a temporary fix to reduce server stress, employees moved the original data — high-resolution pictures of the museum’s artifacts — to the public affairs system, which was connected to servers allowing outside access, the museum said.
Officials from the Ministry of Justice Bureau of Investigation’s Information Security Station and its Taipei office visited the museum to review its records.
Chen Chung-yu (陳中禹), a senior specialist at the museum’s digital information division, said that the original high-resolution pictures were between 20 million and 30 million pixels.
Some people were able to access and download about 100,000 “screenshots” in the open system and piece the parts together into whole images, Chen said.
The museum has moved the high-resolution images to servers that are not open to public access, the museum’s Administrative Affairs Deputy Director Huang Yung-tai (黃永泰) said yesterday.
Aside from handing Lin a reprimand on Feb. 16, the museum at the end of last year installed a system that placed all applications to download original files behind internal enclosed storage systems.
Investigators determined that the incident was due to an administrative error and was not the work of hackers, Huang said.
The museum added that it would hire legal consultants to negotiate with e-commerce platforms Taobao and Shuge to remove the products from their Web sites.
Should negotiations fall through, the museum said it would consider further legal action.
Additional reporting by CNA
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