Reposted from The Washington Post

On a recent afternoon, a seemingly unremarkable brown parcel appeared on the front porch of Martin Goldsmith’s home in Kensington, Md.

Goldsmith, 68, swiftly pried open the package. With careful hands, he uncovered a 16th-century kettle that belonged to Goldsmith’s grandparents before they died in the Holocaust.

He examined the double-spouted cauldron — composed of brass, bronze and iron — with awe. It had quite a path before it landed on his doorstep.

Goldsmith is well-versed in his family’s tragic history, having written two books on the subject. But unlike the anecdotes he has strung together over the years, the kettle represents something different to him: a rare, tactile treasure linking him to his paternal grandparents — whom he never met.

Holding the kettle for the first time, Goldsmith was moved to tears.

“There are very few things in the known universe that my grandparents touched,” Goldsmith said. “It was a semi-miraculous opportunity to touch something they had touched, to hold something they had held.”

In early April, Goldsmith was unexpectedly contacted by an art historian from a museum in Oldenburg — the city in northwest Germany where his grandparents once lived and where his father was born.

The message came from Marcus Kenzler — a researcher and cultural scientist who traces the origins of Nazi-looted property at the State Museum for Art and Cultural History, with the aim of returning the objects to the descendants of the original owners.

“Like every human being, every object has its own individual biography,” said Kenzler, 48. He studies decades-old records to determine an object’s exact origins, searching for traces left by previous owners in an effort to reconstruct the precise path a relic once took.

According to the museum’s inventory book, the kettle in question was sold by the Goldschmidt family in November 1934. Notably, “intensive research has shown that the sale of the kettle did not take place voluntarily but had a Nazi-persecution-related background,” Kenzler added.

The Nazi involvement in the acquisition was made clear by the glaringly low sales price of the kettle: 20 Reichsmark, or approximately $11. In 1942, another museum acquired a similar object for 300 Reichsmark. Today, the kettle is valued at roughly $2,500.

This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. More than 20 percent of art in Europe, collectively worth billions of dollars, was looted or coerced into a sale by the Nazis. It’s estimated that 100,000 pieces of the more than 600,000 stolen artifacts are still missing. The burden of restitution typically rests on descendants, who must prove their relation to the original owner.

In an email to Goldsmith, Kenzler outlined his findings.

“Fortunately, the history of your family can be reconstructed very well through your books, and I was able to find numerous other sources,” he wrote.

Kenzler suggested that once his research was complete, the kettle — or Lavabokessel, the German term for the pouring vessel — should belong to Goldsmith, the last living relative of Alex and Toni Goldschmidt. Goldsmith has no children, and his parents, as well as his only brother, have all died.

“I was very excited when I contacted Martin for the first time,” said Kenzler, adding that since beginning his research in 2011, he has returned only three other artifacts to the families of the original owners — two antique pieces of tin-glazed pottery and a large Renaissance cabinet. “It happens far too rarely that the provenance of a work of art or an object can be completely deciphered.”

“I still have a lot of cases to solve,” he continued. “This work is important, and we have the historical obligation to come to terms with the injustices and horrors of the past.”

In response to Kenzler’s email, Goldsmith wrote, “Though born decades after the Nazi era, you have not shirked from the responsibility of facing up to the horrors of those years but rather have done what you can to try to balance the scales of justice, impossible though that task may ultimately be.”

The kettle finally arrived in Maryland on Oct. 11, nearly 86 years after it had left the family’s hands.

Before World War II, Goldsmith’s grandfather, Alex Goldschmidt, operated a successful women’s clothing store, called Haus der Mode, in Oldenburg. The family of six lived in a grand home, adorned with sculptures, paintings and other artistic objects that reflected their good fortune.

Everything changed in November 1932, when Nazi officials informed the Goldschmidts that they had no choice but to sell their home — since a Jew was no longer permitted to own such a fine dwelling. It was sold for a mere fraction of its true value.

“The house is worth easily $6 million today, and it was sold for just over $10,000,” Goldsmith said. “They were forced to move into smaller and smaller quarters.”

In the years that followed, more laws and restrictions against Jews were enacted, leading up to the November Pogrom in 1938 — also known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass — in which thousands of Jewish-owned shops and synagogues were destroyed throughout Nazi Germany, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, including Goldsmith’s grandfather, Alex Goldschmidt.

The following year, Alex Goldschmidt and his son Helmut fled Germany on the S.S. St. Louis, a ship filled mostly with Jewish refugees that sailed to Cuba, but was turned away. After unsuccessfully appealing to the United States and Canada, the ship and its passengers returned to Europe.

In August 1942, Alex Goldschmidt and Helmut were murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp. Two months later, his wife, Toni, and their daughter Eva were killed in a forest outside Riga, Latvia.

One Goldschmidt daughter survived, escaping to Leeds, England. A son, Gunther Ludwig Goldschmidt, managed to flee to America when he was 27 — just in time to be spared. Once in the United States, he changed his name to George Gunther Goldsmith, and had two sons, one of them being Martin Goldsmith.

While in Germany, George Goldsmith was able to survive by being part of an all-Jewish performing arts ensemble called Jüdischer Kulturbund, composed of musicians, artists and actors who had been barred from German institutions. The Nazis permitted the group, which his wife (Martin Goldsmith’s mother) also belonged to, as part of a Nazi propaganda effort to shield the oppression of Jews from the outside world.

The group was eventually forced to shutter in 1941, though Goldsmith’s parents managed to make it to New York City immediately before.

They raised their two sons in St. Louis and spoke very little of their Jewish identity or past traumas, Goldsmith recalled.

“In my father’s mind, to be a Jew was to be an outcast, to be hated, to be murdered,” said Goldsmith. “So, I did not grow up with a sense of being a Jew.”

Goldsmith moved through life, attending Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and ultimately settling in Kensington, with very little attachment to Judaism.

It wasn’t until his 50s that Goldsmith, who has worked as a radio host and classical music programmer for 45 years in the D.C. area, developed a yearning to understand his Jewish identity and family history.

“I had a desire to somehow be connected to my family, to the people who, by all rights, I should have known,” Goldsmith said, adding that he studied and had his bar mitzvah at age 55.

He went on to write two books about the Goldschmidt family history, one of which — “The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany” — has become the basis for an upcoming documentary film he co-wrote called “Winter Journey,” airing this December. The book and film chronicle the story of Goldsmith’s parents and their experience playing in an all-Jewish orchestra in Nazi Germany.

In researching his books, Goldsmith visited Oldenburg several times and even toured the stately house that his family once occupied, now inhabited by a German architect and his family.

“I experienced nearly every emotion in the catalogue,” Goldsmith said. “It was terribly exciting to be inside this house where my family had lived, and it was devastating to think of what had happened to them.”

Although the brief visit to the home brought Goldsmith closer to his relatives in some way, it was fleeting, he said.

“The house is no longer in the family. The paintings and various other art objects in the house are all gone. Traces of my family are gone. Except for this little kettle,” he said from the dining room of his Maryland home, where the kettle now sits on a shelf in a place of honor.

Goldsmith looked over at the small vestige of his legacy — a tangible piece of his history, that is finally his to hold.

“It’s an object that 85 years ago lived in my grandparents’ house. These people whom I never had a chance to meet passed by it and touched it and used it,” said Goldsmith, adding that this type of kettle was historically — and ironically, given the pandemic — used for the ceremonial washing of hands, though he is not sure how his grandparents used it, or if it was simply on display in their home.

Since the kettle arrived, every evening before bed, Goldsmith finds himself doing the same thing: “I walk past it, and I touch it,” he said. “It’s a way of telling my family good night.”

See Original Post

Reposted from IFCPP Associate Member Art Sentry

Since the COVID-19 outbreak hit, many museums and cultural institutions around the world have needed to temporarily close their doors. While this obviously affects the financial well-being of each of these individual institutions, the broad cultural benefits of museums in our country, our greater economy, and the emotional well-being of our society have been sorely missed.

It may be a cliche to say that learning from the past can help us guide our way to a prosperous future, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.  2020 has seen our culture become divided along political and cultural lines, and the opportunity to study past societies is as important as ever in these polarized times. Museums and cultural institutions play a significant role in helping us find perspective and context for our current issues, and the lack of access to that historical background certainly isn’t helping us overcome this division.

It’s also important not to minimize the contributions our artistic and cultural institutions have on our collective emotional well-being. The human experience is all about connection—to each other, to our environment, to our past, and to our future. Without access to art and culture, part of that connection is temporarily missing from our lives.

This is especially true at the local level. There are more than 35,000 museums in the United States, and regional museums (like America’s many great county museums) are a vital piece of our communities. Local museums are invaluable as they offer a glimpse into the history of a specific location, and help us to honor our communal cultures, customs, heritage, and legacy.

The impact on our educational institutions is clear as well. We can’t expect our children to receive the same level of instruction and cultural experience on a video call as they would by browsing the aisles of an art museum or interacting with the exhibits at their local science museum.

Economically, the importance of museums and cultural institutions to the broader tourism industry cannot be overlooked. Popular museums draw in visitors from every corner of the earth, and people often plan vacations around visits to these institutions.

Without those tourism dollars, local economies around the country are being stretched thin. In fact, the museum industry contributes around $50 billion to the United States economy each year, and there are more than 725,000 jobs associated with these institutions. That’s a significant financial and societal cost that isn’t easily replaced.

Furthermore, the impact of cultural institutions on marginalized communities is nearly immeasurable. Museums that explore issues related to race relations, sexual orientation (or gender identity), and other historically vulnerable social groups are vital to the health of those communities and encourage allyship—which is always important in divisive and uncertain times.

Thankfully, the doors of these institutions are beginning to open. Someday soon, we will return to our fully-open artistic and cultural establishments, and Art Sentry’s state-of-the-art security features are here to ensure that this return goes as smoothly as possible. The last thing any museum staff wants to worry about when reopening their doors is the safety and security of their exhibits.

To learn more about how our comprehensive security system reduces costs, prevents object touches and works in tandem with your security team, contact us today!

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Reposted from The Guardian

Some of the most precious paintings in the world, a billion-dollar haul including work by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas and Manet, were stolen from a gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, in an audacious heist 30 years ago. But now, just as a British detective closes in on what he believes are the best clues so far to the masterpieces’ hiding place, his key contact, an Irish gangster, has disappeared.

Martin “the Viper” Foley, a well-known convicted criminal who has operated on the fringes of gangland political violence in Ireland for half a century, has suddenly dropped out of negotiations, according to Charles Hill, a leading art sleuth. And Foley’s promise to reunite the public with these great works, including Vermeer’s The Concert, the most valuable missing artwork in the world, has vanished with him.

Over a string of secret meetings and telephone calls in the summer of 2019, Foley steered Hill towards a potential deal with the surviving members of a gang he claims took the art and hid it three decades ago. But this summer, after early publicity in Ireland about the negotiations, Foley, who is also wanted for unpaid taxes, dropped out of sight.

It was reported in February that the 66-year-old was in hiding after a warning from the Gardai, the Irish police, of a serious threat to his life from fellow gang members. “If anyone can find these paintings, Charley Hill can,” said John Wilson, the BBC journalist behind a new documentary film, The Billion Dollar Art Hunt, about the investigation. “He is still convinced they are in Ireland and that a deal to return them is possible.”

In the early hours of 18 March 1990, as the noise of St Patrick’s Day celebrations dwindled outside, two men dressed as police officers entered Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and, after handcuffing the guards, took almost an hour and a half to select the artworks they wanted. The heist remains notorious in the art world, and is the single biggest theft of property in America.

The museum is offering a $10m reward for information leading to the paintings’ recovery. Hill, a former head of the Met’s art and antiques squad who recovered Edvard Munch’s The Scream in 1994, followed a credible lead to west Dublin last autumn. Wilson and a BBC camera crew chronicled the investigation for the documentary, which is to be shown on BBC4 next week.

Since leaving the police after 20 years, Hill has operated independently and so is able to offer ransom money on behalf of the owners of missing artworks. This means working at the dangerous interface between art thieves and dealers, and in the case of the Boston heist, also on the edges of the world of former Republican activists in Ireland. Hill led a team that recovered another Vermeer and a Goya stolen in 1986 from Russborough House in County Wicklow. This theft had been masterminded by an old associate of Foley’s, the Dublin gangster Martin Cahill.

Foley, who is also wanted in Ireland for unpaid taxes amounting to €738,449 (£669,500), failed to meet Hill and Wilson in person in Ireland, but another criminal source, who appears anonymously in the film, confirmed his theory that the works were shipped to Ireland after the Boston theft.

“The Boston police, the FBI and the security experts at the museum have always believed the paintings stayed in the city, but Charley disagrees, because there are too many things pointing to Ireland now,” said Wilson this weekend.

If anyone has recently walked into a room where The Concert, or Rembrandt’s only seascape, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, were hanging, to say nothing of the Manet, five sketches by Degas and a Govert Flinck landscape, they are likely to have become suspicious. The truth is, however, that they are probably all hidden behind a wall or in a cellar, on one side of the Atlantic or the other, waiting to serve as collateral in gangland trade or to be swapped for cash.

The still-empty frames in the museum where they were once proudly displayed are a reminder of what has been lost. Wilson and Hill travel to Boston for the documentary to speak to the curators and detectives who have followed every twist in the story. The trail led first to the Italian-American community in the city and then it indicated the involvement of James “Whitey” Bulger, one of America’s most wanted crime bosses until his arrest in 2011 in Santa Monica. FBI agents uncovered money and illegal firearms in his home, but no art.

For Hill, and for the museum’s security adviser, Anthony Amore, the unlikely theft of some lower-value sketches of horses by the French artist Edgar Degas, points at the very least to a group of criminals with a strong interest in the race track.

See Original Post

Reposted from Artnet News

A Canadian woman who stole artifacts from Pompeii 15 years ago has now returned them, claiming that they have brought nothing but bad luck to her family.

The 36-year-old woman, who gave only her first name of Nicole, sent a hand-written confession and apology along with the stolen objects—which include parts of an amphora vase, mosaic tiles, and shards of ceramics—to a travel agent in southern Italy, who then passed them along to officials.

“I was young and dumb,” Nicole wrote in the letter, which was first published in the Italian newspaper Il Messagerro. “I wanted to have a piece of history that couldn’t be bought. I never realized or thought about what I was actually taking. I took a piece of history captured in time that has so much negative energy attached to it.”

She goes on to explain that she associates her youthful indiscretion with a long run of bad luck, including two bouts of breast cancer, a double mastectomy, and ongoing financial issues. “We’re good people and I don’t want to pass this curse on to my family or children,” the letter concludes, “please, take them back.”

Pompeii’s own legacy of bad luck begins, of course, with its instantaneous obliteration amid Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD, which wiped out all inhabitants. Although for many years historians believed that the residents were suffocated by the volcanic ash, excavations revealed that collapsed buildings crushed most of the people. The residents of Pompeii lived opulent, pleasure-seeking lives, and the mystery of their untimely demise has incited some to wonder if their sexual proclivities and materialistic ways somehow contributed to their death.

Nicole is not the first visitor to return objects to Pompeii that had “negative energy.” In 2015, a rash of guilt-ridden tourists sent back stones and other ceramic pieces, citing a curse that they traced back to visiting the ancient ruins. A Canadian couple also returned tokens they swiped from the site.

“We are sorry,” Nicole ended her confession, “please forgive us for making this terrible choice. May their souls rest in peace.”

See Original Post

Reposted from The Telegraph

Art thieves are targeting the same high-profile paintings in the hope of ransoming them for their safe return, experts have warned.

The growing number of cases of world-famous paintings being stolen more than once has raised concerns that museums are failing to learn the lessons of previous thefts.

But it has also raised the prospect that thieves are targeting the same paintings over and over again not for their own worth but to be used as a bargaining chip in the future.

In some cases gangs are thought to use brokers or intermediaries to obtain cash rewards from insurance firms for their return.

In others paintings of high artistic and financial value are being deployed as a means of reducing any jail sentences if members of organised criminal gangs are caught and brought to trial.

Gangs are also thought to be using the theft of paintings to enhance their prestige and reputation in criminal circles.

Art recovery investigator and lawyer Chris Marinello (below) has warned that collectors and art retrieval services need to stop agreeing to pay large sums for the return of stolen paintings.

He told The Telegraph: “There are some unscrupulous operators who hold themselves out as art recovery experts who will pay criminals, or more usually middle-men, for the return of stolen objects.

“Unfortunately this creates a market for further thefts, sometimes of the very same paintings, down the line.”

There is no suggestion the world’s established art museums are engaging in such practices, says Mr Marinello. However, private collectors are less likely to ask questions in return for their beloved pieces.

The repeated theft of a number of high-profile paintings in recent years has raised concerns over the tactics of organised gangs and the response of the international art market.

Frans Hals’s Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer was stolen for the third time in as many decades, making it the latest high-profile work to become a repeat victim of seemingly targeted thefts. 

In the most recent theft the 1626 painting was taken in August from the Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden museum, in Leerdam, during an overnight raid by thieves who forced their way into the back of the building in the western Netherlands. 

It had previously been stolen from the museum in 1988 and 2011, along with - on both occasions - another 17th-century work, Forest View with Flowering Elderberry by Jacob van Ruisdael.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream has been stolen twice from its Oslo museum and Ruisdael’s The Cornfield, was stolen three times between 1974 and 2002.

Mr Marinello, the chief executive and founder of Art Recovery International, says that in some cases police will approve the payment of rewards for the return of stolen art, though this is illegal in some jurisdictions, if the ‘finder’ of the painting is vetted and found to be legitimate. 

In rare cases government agencies approve the payment of rewards  for information leading to the return of national treasures, such as the Turner paintings owned by the Tate - Light and Colour and Shade and Darkness - stolen from a Frankfurt museum in 1994.

But Mr Marinello, who has worked with foreign governments and heirs of Holocaust victims to recover stolen and looted artwork and cultural property, added: “There are some unscrupulous people on the fringes who broker deals with insurance companies and this only serves to encourage repeated thefts of paintings. If we as a firm refuse to pay for say, a stolen Picasso - as we have in the past -  someone else will unfortunately do so.

“I get calls all the time offering to sell me something that is clearly stolen, but I don’t pay criminals.”

Mr Marinello says that as well as being exchanged for cash for their safe return stolen works can be used as leverage to obtain reduced criminal sentences.

“A criminal gang or fence will obtain a painting from a thief to be used down the line in order to plea bargain, allowing them to offer up the work of art so it can be taken into account when it comes to sentencing.”

Robert Read, the head of art and private clients at Hiscox insurers, added. “One thing I’m seeing more of is the use of such stolen works as a bargaining chip for [reducing] sentences, particularly in Italy, France and the US, where there is a culture of plea bargaining. The more publicity and better known a work is, the better.”

In some cases stolen paintings are traded in the underworld for other commodities, such as guns or drugs. In the seventies the IRA attempted to use 19 paintings worth £8 million stolen from the Alfred Beit collection at Russborough House, in Blessington, south of Dublin, as collateral to buy arms. The collection has been subsequently targeted by criminal gangs on at least three other occasions.

Art Recovery International has urged museums to avoid slipping into complacency over the strength of their security systems, warning that a painting stolen once could be targeted again.

“Many museums don’t necessarily beef up security after a theft and hope that ‘lightning won’t strike twice,” said Mr Marinello.

“That is obviously not the case and they need to learn from these repeat offences.”

See Original Post

Reposted from ZDNet

What is a DDoS attack?

A distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) sees an attacker flooding the network or servers of the victim with a wave of internet traffic so big that their infrastructure is overwhelmed by the number of requests for access, slowing down services or taking them fully offline and preventing legitimate users from accessing the service at all. 

While a DDoS attack is one of the least sophisticated categories of cyberattack, it also has the potential to be one of the most disruptive and most powerful by taking websites and digital services offline for significant periods of time that can range from seconds to even weeks at a time.

How does a DDoS attack work?

DDoS attacks are carried out using a network of internet-connected machines – PCs, laptops, servers, Internet of Things devices – all controlled by the attacker. These could be anywhere (hence the term 'distributed') and it's unlikely the owners of the devices realise what they are being used for as they are likely to have been hijacked by hackers. 

Common ways in which cyber criminals take control of machines include malware attacks and gaining access by using the default user name and password the product is issued with – if the device has a password at all. 

Once the attackers have breached the device, it becomes part of a botnet – a group of machines under their control. Botnets can be used for all manner of malicious activities, including distributing phishing emails, malware or ransomware, or in the case of a DDoS attack, as the source of a flood of internet traffic.

The size of a botnet can range from a relatively small number of zombie devices, to millions of them. Either way the botnet's controllers can turn the web traffic generated towards a target and conduct a DDoS attack. 

Servers, networks and online services are designed to cope with a certain amount of internet traffic but, if they're flooded with additional traffic in a DDoS attack, they become overwhelmed. The high amounts of traffic being sent by the DDoS attack clogs up or takes down the systems' capabilities, while also preventing legitimate users from accessing services (which is the 'denial of service' element). 

A DDoS attack is launched with the intention of taking services offline in this way, although it's also possible for online services to be overwhelmed by regular traffic by non-malicious users – for example, if hundreds of thousands of people are trying to access a website to buy concert tickets as soon as they go on sale. However, this is usually only short, temporary and accidental, while DDoS attacks can be sustained for long periods of time.

What is an IP stresser and how does it relate to DDoS attacks?

An IP stresser is a service that can be used by organisations to test the robustness of their networks and servers. The goal of this test is to find out if the existing bandwidth and network capacity are enough to handle additional traffic. An IT department using a stresser to test their own network is a perfectly legitimate application of an IP stresser. 

However, using an IP stresser against a network that you don't operate is illegal in many parts of the world – because the end result could be a DDoS attack. However, there are cyber-criminal groups and individuals that will actively use IP stressers as part of a DDoS attack. 

What was the first DDoS attack?

What's widely regarded as the first malicious DDoS attack occurred in July 1999 when the computer network at the University of Minnesota was taken down for two days. 

A network of 114 computers infected with Trin00 malware all directed their traffic at a computer at the university, overwhelming the network with traffic and blocking legitimate use. No effort was made to hide the IP address of the computers launching the traffic – and the owners of the attacking systems had no idea their computers were infected with malware and were causing an outage elsewhere. 

Trin00 might not have been a large botnet, but it's the first recorded incident of cyber attackers taking over machines that didn't belong to them and using the web traffic to disrupt the network of an particular target. And in the two decades since, DDoS attacks have only become bigger and more disruptive. 

Famous DDoS attacks: MafiaBoy – February 2000

The world didn't have to wait long after the University of Minnesota incident to see how disruptive DDoS attacks could be. By February 2000, 15-year-old Canadian Michael Calce – online alias MafiaBoy – had managed to take over a number of university networks, roping a large number of computers into a botnet. 

He used this for a DDoS attack that took down some of the biggest websites at the start of the new millennium, including Yahoo! – which at the time was the biggest search engine in the world – eBay, Amazon, CNN, and more.  

Calce was arrested and served eight months in a youth detection centre after pleading guilty to charges against him. He was also fined C$1,000 ($660) for conducting the attacks – which it's estimated caused over $1.7 billion in damages – and went on to become a computer security analyst. 

Famous DDoS attacks: Estonia – April 2007

By the mid 2000s, it was apparent that DDoS attacks could be a potent tool in the cyber-criminal arsenal, but the world was about to see a new example of how disruptive DDoS attacks could be; by taking down the internet services of an entire country. 

In April 2007, Estonia was – and still is – one of the most digitally advanced countries in the world, with almost every government service accessible online to the country's 1.3 million citizens through an online ID system. 

But from 27 April, Estonia was hit with a series of DDoS attacks disrupting all online services in the country, as well as parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters. People weren't able to access the services they needed on a daily basis.

Attacks were launched on multiple occasions, including during a particularly intense period of 24 hours on 9 May – the day Russia celebrates Victory in Europe day for World War II, before eventually falling away later in the month. 

The DDoS campaigns came at a time when Estonia was involved in a political dispute with Russia over the relocation of a Soviet statue in Tallinn.  

Some members of Estonian leadership have accused Russia of orchestrating the attacks, something that the Kremlin has always denied.

Famous DDoS attacks: Spamhaus – March 2013 

The Spamhaus Project's goal is to track the activity of spammers on the web in order to help internet providers and email services with a real-time list of common spam emails, posts and messages in order to prevent users from seeing them and potentially being scammed. 

But in March 2013, Spamhaus itself fell victim to cyber criminals when 300 billion bits of data a second was launched at it in what was at the time the biggest DDoS attack ever, and one that lasted for almost two weeks. 

Cloudflare dubbed it  'The DDoS' attack that almost broke the internet' after the web infrastructure and web-security company stepped in to mitigate the attack against Spamhaus – and then found cyber attackers attempting to take Cloudflare itself offline. But the impact of the attack was much greater because the sheer scale of the attack caused congestion across the internet. 

Famous DDoS attacks: Mirai – October 2016

In probably the most famous DDoS attack to date, the Mirai botnet took down vast swathes of online services across much of Europe and North America. News websites, Spotify, Reddit, Twitter, the PlayStation Network and many other digital services were either slowed down to a crawl or completely inaccessible to millions of people. Fortunately, the outages lasted for less than one day. 

Described as the biggest online blackout in history, the downtime was caused by a DDoS attack against Dyn, the domain name system provider for hundreds of major websites. The attacks was explicitly designed to overload its capability. 

What helped make the attack so powerful was the Mirai botnet had taken control of millions of IoT devices, including cameras, routers, smart TVs and printers, often just by brute-forcing default credentials, if the devices had a password at all. And while the traffic generated by individual IoT devices is small, the sheer number of devices in the botnet was overwhelming to Dyn. And Mirai still lives on.

How do I know if I'm under DDoS attack?

Any business or organisation that has a web-facing element needs to think about the regular web traffic it receives and provision for it accordingly; large amounts of legitimate traffic can overwhelm servers, leading to slow or no service, something that could potentially drive customers and consumers away. 

But organisations also need to be able to differentiate between legitimate web traffic and DDoS attack traffic. 

Capacity planning is, therefore, a key element of running a website, with thought put into determining what's an expected, regular amount of traffic and what unusually high or unanticipated volumes of legitimate traffic could look like, so as to avoid causing disruption to users – either by taking out the site due to high demands, or mistakenly blocking access due to a DDoS false alarm.

So how can organisations differentiate between a legitimate increase in demand and a DDoS attack? 

In general, an outage caused my legitimate traffic will only last for a very short period of time and often there might be an obvious reason for the outage, such as an online retailer experiencing high demand for a new item, or a new video game's online servers getting very high traffic from gamers eager to play. 

But in the case of a DDoS attack, there are some tell-tale signs that it's a malicious and targeted campaign. Often DDoS attacks are designed to cause disruption over a sustained period of time, which could mean sudden spikes in malicious traffic at intervals causing regular outages. 

The other key sign that your organisation has likely been hit with a DDoS attack is that services suddenly slow down or go offline for days at a time, which would indicate the services are being targeted by attackers who just want to cause as much disruption as possible. Some of these attackers might be doing it just to cause chaos; some may be paid to attack a particular site or service. Others might be trying to run some kind of extortion racket, promising to drop the attack in exchange for a pay-off. 

What do I do if I'm under DDoS attack?

Once it's become clear that you're being targeted by DDoS attack, you should piece together a timeline of when the problems started and how long they've been going on for, as well as identifying which assets like applications, services and servers are impacted – and how that's negatively impacting users, customers and the business as a whole. 

It's also important that organisations notify their web-hosting provider – it's likely that they will have also seen the DDoS attack, but contacting them directly may help curtail the impacts of a DDoS campaign – especially if it's possible for the provider to switch your IP address. Switching the IP to a new address will mean that the DDoS attack won't have the impact it did because the attack will be pointing in the wrong direction. 

If your security provider provides a DDoS mitigation service, it should help reduce the impact of the attack, but as seen with attacks like Mirai, especially large attacks that can still cause disruption despite the presence of preventative measures. The unfortunate thing about DDoS attacks is that while they're very simple to conduct, they're also very effective, so it's still possible that even with measures in place that services could be taken offline for some time. 

It's also important to notify users of the service about what is happening, because otherwise they could be left confused and frustrated by a lack of information. Businesses should consider putting up a temporary site explaining that there are problems and provide users with information they should follow if they need the service. Social-media platforms like Twitter and Facebook can also be used to promote this message. 

How do I protect against DDoS attacks?

What makes DDoS attacks effective is the ability to direct a large amount of traffic at a particular target. If all of an organisations' online resources are in one location, the attackers only need to go after one particular target to cause disruption with large amounts of traffic. If possible, it's therefore useful to spread systems out, so it's more difficult – although not impossible – for attackers to direct resources towards everything at once.

Monitoring web traffic and having an accurate idea about what regular traffic looks like, and what is abnormal traffic, can also play a vital role in helping to protect against or spotting DDoS attacks. Some security personnel recommend setting up alerts that notify you if the number of requests is above a certain threshold. While this might not necessarily indicate malicious activity, it does at least provide a potential early warning that something might be on the way. 

It's also useful to plan for scale and spikes in web traffic, which is something that using a cloud-based hosting provider can aid with. 

Firewalls and routers can play an important role in mitigating the potential damage of a DDoS attack. If configured correctly, they can deflect bogus traffic by analysing it as potentially dangerous and blocking it before it arrives. However, it's also import to note that in order for this to be effective, firewall and security software needs to be patched with the latest updates to remain as effective as possible. 

Using an IP stresser service can be an effective way of testing your own bandwidth capability. There are also specialist DDoS mitigation service providers that can help organisations deal with a sudden large upsurge in web traffic, helping to prevent damage by attacks. 

What is a DDoS mitigation service?

DDoS attack mitigation services protect the network from DDoS attacks by re-routing malicious traffic away from the network of the victim. High profile DDoS mitigation service providers include Cloudflare, Akamai, Radware and many others. 

The first job of a mitigation service is to be able to detect a DDoS attack and distinguish what's actually a malicious event from what's just a regular – if unusually high – volume of traffic. 

Common means of DDoS mitigation services doing this include judging the reputation of the IP the majority of traffic is coming from. If it's from somewhere unusual or known to be malicious, it could indicate an attack – while another way is looking out for common patterns associated with malicious traffic, often based on what's been learned from previous incidents. 

Once an attack has been identified as legitimate, a DDoS protection service will move to respond by absorbing and deflecting the malicious traffic as much as possible. This is helped along by routing the traffic into manageable chunks that will ease the mitigation process and help prevent denial-of-service. 

How do I choose a DDoS mitigation service?

Like any IT procurement, choosing a DDoS mitigation service isn't as simple as just selecting the first solution that appears. Organisations will need to choose a service based on their needs and circumstances. For example, a small business probably isn't going to have any reason to fork out for the DDoS mitigation capabilities required by a global conglomerate. 

However, if the organisation looking for a DDoS mitigation service is a large business, then they're probably correct to look at large overflow capacities to help mitigate attacks. Looking at a network that has two or three times more capacity than the largest attacks known to date should be more than enough to keep operations online, even during a large DDoS attack. 

While DDoS attacks can cause disruption from anywhere in the world, the geography and location of a DDoS mitigation service provider can be a factor. A European-based company could have an effective US DDoS protection provider, but if that provider doesn't have servers or scrubbing centres based in Europe, the latency of the response time could prove to be a problem, especially if it causes a problem for re-routing traffic. 

When deciding on a service provider, organisations should, therefore, consider if the DDoS protection network will be effective in their region of the world. For example, a European company should probably consider a DDoS mitigation provider with a European scrubbing centre to help remove or redirect malicious traffic as quickly as possible.   

However, despite all the ways to potentially prevent a DDoS attack, sometimes attackers will still be successful anyway – because if attackers really want to take down a service and have enough resources, they'll do their best to be successful at it. But if an organisation is aware of the warning signs of a DDoS attack, it's possible to be prepared for when it happens.  

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Reposted from The New York Times

Early one afternoon in June, the Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza walked into the Quai Branly Museum, the riverfront institution that houses treasures from France’s former colonies, and bought a ticket. Together with four associates, he wandered around the Paris museum’s African collections, reading the labels and admiring the treasures on show.

Yet what started as a standard museum outing soon escalated into a raucous demonstration as Mr. Diyabanza began denouncing colonial-era cultural theft while a member of his group filmed the speech and live-streamed it via Facebook. With another group member’s help, he then forcefully removed a slender 19th-century wooden funerary post, from a region that is now in Chad or Sudan, and headed for the exit. Museum guards stopped him before he could leave.

The next month, in the southern French city of Marseille, Mr. Diyabanza seized an artifact from the Museum of African, Oceanic and Native American Arts in another live-streamed protest, before being halted by security. And earlier this month, in a third action that was also broadcast on Facebook, he and other activists took a Congolese funeral statue from the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal, the Netherlands, before guards stopped him again.

Now, Mr. Diyabanza, the spokesman for a Pan-African movement that seeks reparations for colonialism, slavery and cultural expropriation, is set to stand trial in Paris on Sept. 30. Along with the four associates from the Quai Branly action, he will face a charge of attempted theft, in a case that is also likely to put France on the stand for its colonial track record and for holding so much of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage — 90,000 or so objects — in its museums.

“The fact that I had to pay my own money to see what had been taken by force, this heritage that belonged back home where I come from — that’s when the decision was made to take action,” said Mr. Diyabanza in an interview in Paris this month.

Describing the Quai Branly as “a museum that contains stolen objects,” he added, “There is no ban on an owner taking back his property the moment he comes across it.”

President Emmanuel Macron pledged in 2017 to give back much of Africa’s heritage held by France’s museums, and commissioned two academics to draw up a report on how to do it.

The 2018 report, by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, said any artifacts removed from sub-Saharan Africa in colonial times should be permanently returned if they were “taken by force, or presumed to be acquired through inequitable conditions,” and if their countries of origin asked for them.

Only 27 restitutions have been announced so far, and just one object has been returned.

The Quai Branly funerary post, according to its museum label, was a gift from a French doctor and explorer who went on ethnological missions around Africa. But to Mr. Diyabanza and his associates, the museum’s contents are all the products of expropriation. As he said in the live-streamed speech before seizing the item, he had “come to claim back the stolen property of Africa, property that was stolen under colonialism.”

Mr. Diyabanza, who faces a separate trial in Marseille in November, said in the interview that fury had led him to remove the object in a spontaneous and unpremeditated act, and that he had chosen the post because it was “easily accessible” and not bolted in place.

“Anywhere that our artworks and heritage are locked up, we will go and get them,” he added.

Mr. Diyabanza is not alone in staging museum actions. On Friday, a London court found Isaiah Ogundele, 34, guilty on a harassment charge over a protest in a slavery-related gallery at the Museum of London. According to a statement from the museum, the demonstration took place in January in front of four African works on loan from the British Museum.

The worry among museum administrators and cultural officials is that such actions will multiply, wreak havoc inside museums and scuttle restitution talks between Europe and Africa.

Dan Hicks, a professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford University and curator at the university’s Pitt Rivers Museum, which has extensive colonial-era holdings, described Mr. Diyabanza’s intervention at the Quai Branly as “a visual protest,” tailored for social media, that involved a role reversal: a cultural object was being seized in Europe on behalf of people in Africa. He said the episode was “about objects in museums and how we feel about them” and raised questions about “culture, race, historic violence, history and memory.”

“When it comes to the point that our audience feels the need to protest, then we’re probably doing something wrong,” he added. “We need to open our doors to conversations when our displays have hurt or upset people.”

The funerary post was absent on a recent visit to the Quai Branly museum. A spokesman for the museum declined to answer questions about its condition and location, but a guard said that it was being restored. The only traces of it were a few holes on the display platform, where it normally stands.

The Quai Branly spokesman said that the museum strongly condemned the June action. It was a civil party in the case and would be represented at the Sept. 30 hearing, he added.

In court, Mr. Diyabanza and his four associates will be defended by three lawyers.

“We are going to put slavery and colonialism on trial on Sept. 30,” said one of the lawyers, Calvin Job. “We are leading a legitimate battle against unjust accusations.”

The French state has “objects in its collections that are the product of theft,” Mr. Job added. “If there are any thieves in this case, they’re not on this side of the bar, they’re on the other side.”

Hakim Chergui, another of the lawyers, said that Mr. Diyabanza’s action should not be viewed as an attempted theft but as a political statement. He was confident the defendants would be acquitted, because France did not prosecute people on political grounds, he said.

“We’re not talking about a bunch of swindlers who wanted to steal a statue to resell it,” he said. “These are clearly people who have a political message and who, through a militant act, want to engage with public opinion.”

He explained that the defense team would use the precedent of a member of the protest group Femen who was acquitted on a charge of sexual exhibition after she bared her chest in a wax museum and attacked a statue of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. An appeal court ruled her behavior a political protest.

The interview with Mr. Diyabanza and the lawyers took place at an outdoor cafe near the Rosa Parks subway station in the north of the French capital. Mr. Diyabanza wore an ivory necklace, a black beret and a map of Africa pin.

As a teenager in what was then Zaire, he said, his mother told him that, sometime in the 19th century, European colonizers seized three important objects — a sculpted cane, a leopard skin and a bracelet — from his great-grandfather, a provincial governor in Congo who had received the objects as symbols of power and authority from the country’s king.

“This heritage was savagely snatched away,” Mr. Diyabanza said. “The story I heard from my mother shaped my thinking, and it gave me a strong desire to see this heritage make its way back home one day.”

As he spoke, a cyclist riding by recognized him from social media videos, and stopped to talk. “We follow you, we support your ideas, and we encourage you a lot, but be careful,” said the cyclist, Abdel Adekambi, a French math student of Nigerian-Beninese descent.

“In principle, you are completely right about the museum,” Mr. Adekambi said. “But in practice, that’s not the way to go. You should use the law to be heard. Otherwise, this might give a bad image of us, and no one will listen.”

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Reposted from AAM 

It’s a Thursday afternoon in July and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR) is almost empty. Director Marta Mabel Pérez is in her office, leading a virtual hub of staff and other professionals through crisis management, reopening protocols, and plans for the future. She has faced the devastation of the 2017 hurricanes and recent earthquakes. Now she is busy supporting her employees, ensuring her museum complies with new health and safety regulations, and encouraging the territory to formally integrate heritage protection into its COVID-19 response.

Meanwhile in Texas, Steve Pine, a decorative arts conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), says all staff who can work remotely do. Those on the premises must wear masks and physically distance. When distancing is difficult in shared spaces, staff split work weeks on-site and from home, just one of many strategies the museum developed to help keep them safe while continuing their important work. Pine is involved with the statewide heritage emergency network TX-CERA, Texas Collections Emergency Resource Alliance, making Texas hurricane-ready. Now he focuses on collaborating with local networks to battle the crisis facing all museums and sharing information on new best practices.

Finally, on the East Coast, Ben Haavik is responsible for the maintenance and preservation of thirty-seven historic house museums and landscapes for Historic New England, the oldest and largest regional heritage organization in the nation. He champions emergency preparedness and oversees response after one of New England’s famous storms damages a tree or floods one of the homes. Now, his job includes integrating safety guidance for COVID-19 from five different states and twenty-two different towns.

We recently sat down with these three veteran disaster risk managers to brainstorm about planning for weather emergencies amid the new normal. As we spoke to them, their institutions were in different stages of reopening: The MAPR had a soft reopening in mid-July for members, the MFAH re-opened in mid-May, and Historic New England reopened six of its thirty-seven sites in mid-July but has no intentions of opening the remainder this year.

While fortunately none of them has experienced a hurricane this season, two named storms did pass through as near misses, prompting them to review their disaster plans. In some cases, this meant amending timetables to avoid people clustering together to document and move objects, in others it meant enlisting the museum’s building engineer and management company to secure the building, with training on collections care delivered over WhatsApp and videoconferencing.

New Challenges for Hurricane Preparedness

COVID-19 has added a new layer of complexity to the time-consuming process of hurricane preparedness: protecting the health of all involved. This makes it harder to enact “the usual” response to a natural disaster. “We do storms all the time—big storms, small storms, trees down, buildings damaged, and collections damaged. It happens. This was so different,” Haavik says. “We were in uncharted territory. It’s personal health. I can quantify building and landscape damage and whether it’s risky or not. I couldn’t quantify this.”

As we figure out how to integrate COVID-19 considerations into hurricane readiness planning, there are three primary areas to consider:

• People: Who can enter the building after a disaster?
• Preparation: How do you make the work environment safe when the entire community is subject to the demands of the pandemic?
• Operations: What strategies will not only help maintain but also improve the resilience and stability of the organization in this new normal?

People

Normally, hurricane preparedness and response at a cultural institution is an all-hands-on-deck affair. In the past, Haavik noted, “if you had a hurricane hit and someone was sick, they would still probably report to work and help you clean up afterwards. It is a much different environment today.”

Now, people are worried about keeping themselves safe—and about being contagious themselves. This changes the dynamic of how organizations, setting staff well-being as the highest priority, can operate during an emergency.

Overcoming a staffing plan change is one concern. Primary and back-up staff could be ill or need to take the place of someone who is ill.  Another concern: how to disseminate “situational awareness” and up-to-date information widely within the organization, so that those available can take on the response roles needed.

One strategy all the experts said they would consider is deploying professional resources inside and outside the organization differently. Here are some possible approaches:

• Begin to think of your organization as a regional entity. Learn who else is working on hurricane readiness and get to know them before the disaster. Then you will have the option of calling on other professionals outside the impact zone with different expertise for advice or potential help in the impact zone.
• Share your emergency response plan widely within your organization, encouraging staff to become familiar with it. Make sure everyone understands their role and the roles of others. Practice the plan and implement cross-training to fill any gaps and build capacity in critical areas.
• Look beyond your immediate staff and incorporate affiliated people who are already protecting the building. This should include special training that pairs these colleagues with collections professionals.

Preparation

Preparation for the next crisis is never far from the thoughts of people who protect the patrimony of their communities. In Puerto Rico, which faces multiple threats, Pérez and her staff have regular dedicated meetings to prepare for extreme natural events—not only hurricanes, but also COVID-19, earthquakes, and even fireballs (or meteorites, which actually occurred in January 2020). At these meetings, Pérez says, “We review the whole plan for what we have to do, how we have to react, and who we have to train.”

This moment makes preparation more difficult, with multiple layers of emergency to plan for. All three institutions concurrently have health and safety protocols to develop, personal protective equipment (PPE) to stock, and emergency plans to review and adapt. To consolidate some of this planning, adaptive practices could include the following:

• Mandate health protocols, including safe physical distancing, face coverings for those working in close quarters, and N95 masks when mold has bloomed. Assign tasks on alternating schedules so that multiple people don’t have to work in the same small confined space. Create a protocol for cleaning the space upon arrival and departure, and have each staff member use their own set of instruments, from clipboards and pencils to small hand tools.
• Since PPE is a basic requirement for salvaging and moving objects following a disaster, consider how the equipment the institution is purchasing for reopening can be repurposed for hurricane response.
• Create a protocol for those engaged in response and salvage to stop performing a task if they don’t feel comfortable doing it, so that they feel protected.
• Consider how to deploy a local emergency network, whose members, trained in disaster response, can provide a reassuring level of competence and trust.

Operations

As staff learn how to return to work safely, the most basic museum functions are shifting. Every day brings a new challenge: issues like building management, the place of culture in emergency management agency plans, or updating the institution’s disaster plan.

The three museums have all experienced this. Haavik is already on version eight of a COVID-19 safety plan he made with his staff, as the situation continually evolves. Pine, when asked about updating the MFAH disaster plan to incorporate pandemic response, says he would like to enhance PPE and have teams remain as units throughout preparation and recovery, thus limiting the number of staff needing to quarantine should one member develop symptoms and require COVID testing. Pérez is relying on the procedures she worked with the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI) and HENTF to develop after the two 2017 hurricanes. She says, “We have all the training that you [SCRI and HENTF] gave us. We have all the collections logged and we are prepared. Now it is not only the collections staff but everyone in the museum that needs to be trained.”

Best practices to develop as part of regular operations could include the following:

• Develop a solid relationship with local first responders before disaster strikes. Understanding each other’s priorities in the face of disaster and learning how to work together to protect your valuable and vulnerable collections starts with building that relationship.
• Seek opportunities that work in the context of your community to tell your story to those who make the decisions.

While all of our experts agree that disaster plans must be updated to incorporate response to a pandemic, they are not yet ready to formalize any action steps; they are still trying to navigate the unknown as best they can. In time, they will pursue thoughtful planning and revisions. For now, they will continue to document their actions and activities so they can look back—at some point—and gauge what worked and what didn’t.

The Future of Hurricane Readiness

We asked each of our experts what they would most like to share about past experiences in preparing for major storms.

Pine says the keys are preparation and networking. Institutions are stronger together, he believes, and no organization should have to do this alone. Networking also gives you access to talent and experience that you might not have. He has confidence in the Alliance for Response, a local-network model and program of FAIC, which fosters connections between cultural stewards and the local emergency management community, from firefighters to healthcare workers. “Being aware of ways to find paths and connectivity to that community is going to make the preparation so much better informed and the response so much more successful,” Pine says.

Pérez emphasizes the importance of cross-training staff. She prefers to work with everyone at her institution rather than using a hierarchical approach. This ensures that everyone knows exactly what to do in an emergency. She says it is vital to identify who will coordinate the response for you, choosing a person who has the intuition and knowledge to make decisions in a changing environment. She is a strong supporter of ACE PR, Alianza Cultural para Emergencias de Puerto Rico, the heritage emergency network formed after the 2017 hurricanes that can assist cultural institutions before and after disasters. Integrating museum professionals into local and, in her case, territorial emergency management planning is also a key step. The way forward is to convince decision makers that “taking care of collections is an essential function to save patrimony,” says Pérez.

Haavik agrees with the importance of networking. There are always going to be emergencies, and involvement with a statewide coalition can help ensure a coordinated and effective response. He belongs to the statewide network COSTEP MA, Coordinated Statewide Emergency Preparedness in Massachusetts. He also encourages a post-response review of actions undertaken. The goal, he says, is to respond better at the next emergency, to look for the things you can change while understanding that you can’t do everything. Incremental growth in expertise is a sign of progress. “For me,” he says, “it was looking at major tree damage after storms. We started investing in tree care and now we don’t have to clean up as many trees.”

Thinking about hurricane readiness during the pandemic can feel overwhelming. However, you don’t have to do it alone. Connecting with heritage networks and exchanging ideas with colleagues boosts your ability to adapt and respond. Strong planning and communication among staff provide confidence to implement the emergency plan and contribute to the resilience of the organization.

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Reposted from AAM

Many museums are struggling with when, and whether, to open, reclose, and reopen. These enormously difficult decisions may determine whether the organization survives the current crisis. After experiencing the first two stages of this cycle in early July, the San Diego Natural History Museum (The Nat) have decided to remain closed through the remainder of the year. In today’s guest post, President and CEO Judy Gradwohl explains how she and her colleagues decided the best way for The Nat to survive 2020 is to focus on actions online, and in nature, rather than reopening their doors.
–Elizabeth Merritt, VP Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums

It may seem counterintuitive to voluntarily stay closed, especially after the effort expended on our short-lived reopening, but that is exactly what we decided to do at the San Diego Natural History Museum. The decision to remain closed for the duration of 2020 still makes good programmatic and economic sense, despite the fact state and local authorities have given museums the green light to reopen.

There are obvious disadvantages to a prolonged closure, especially one we bring on ourselves. We are forgoing interactions with visitors, along with the educational value and admissions money we usually generate. Some members join to receive free admission, so with no new foot traffic we are expecting a decline in new memberships. With other neighboring museums open, our self-imposed closure could generate negative publicity. And an extended closure prolongs the furlough of our frontline staff.

As significant as these losses are, we expect them to be outweighed by the benefits of staying closed.

Certainty and greater safety in a chaotic world: I’m sure every museum leader can relate to the anxiety, inefficiencies, and unknowns caused by a constantly moving target. Months of preparation went into our reopening. We removed or altered touchable exhibit elements, provided hand sanitizing stations, stocked up on personal protective equipment, installed temperature reading stations for staff, implemented one-way traffic patterns, and developed an entirely new marketing campaign to welcome people back safely.

We were ready, we opened, we welcomed guests with open arms (figuratively, and from behind plexiglass barriers). And five days later, a rise in COVID-19 case numbers mandated the closure of California museums for the second time. It was a vast disappointment to close almost immediately after opening. Every subsequent week that passed required recalculating our budget and cash flow, and increased concern about losing summer admissions—our biggest season of the year.

The decision to stay closed through the end of the year gives us a fixed point to work toward and a more certain planning horizon. We can channel energy and work toward the projects we want to accomplish rather than worriedly monitoring a burgeoning problem.

Ability to reprogram our time and energy: Instead of waiting and lamenting a fall without school visits, our closure helps focus our energy on what we can accomplish instead of what we can’t. With 100 full-time employees remaining on staff, we have a significant workforce to devote to our scientific research, conservation work, education, and planning for the future. Our biological and paleontological fieldwork has increased, resulting in significant finds, a successful binational translocation of red-legged frogs, reintroducing a locally extinct species to Southern California, and increased protection of numerous species.

We have already seen a blossoming of inventive and well-received online programming. Our education staff have shifted their focus to people who can’t or won’t visit by creating digital resources to help schools, aftercare programs, and other caregivers. With a combination of pre-recorded and live programming, they are expanding upon our traditional standards-based school visit program to help students experience nature and meet our scientists.

Our monthly evening lectures and adult programs moved online and became more frequent. We are now hosting webinars with more participants than would fit in our 300-seat theater, and people log in from around California, the nation and the world. We held our first evening talks entirely in Spanish, bolstering our binational mission, and featuring our Mexican colleagues. We’ve seen people attend our virtual programs who might never have stepped foot inside the building. Our Canyoneers, volunteers who usually lead in-person, guided hikes, have curated “best of” hikes for the fall season and are providing online guidance for hikes people can do on their own.

Refocusing on mission: Our organization started nearly 150 years ago as the San Diego Society of Natural History, and we still operate under that legal name. We have always been larger than our physical facilities, and now is no exception. As we close our beloved building and fling open our digital doors, we have the ability to highlight the full range of our mission. Social media that previously was devoted to programming, and attracting visitors is helping everyone understand and enjoy nature in our region, and showcase scientific research and conservation efforts. In place of behind-the-scenes tours and other events for supporters, we are providing frequent updates documenting our accomplishments and how we are delivering on our mission during the shutdown.

Some members join for the discount admission, but many support us because they believe in our cause. We have seen some attrition, but not as much as we had anticipated—a testament to how much people believe in our work. Communication and online member events are focusing on strengthening ties with members through our scientific work, in addition to special programming.

Opportunity for minor construction projects:  We are hoping to complete small construction projects that were already approved and funded. It is easier and potentially less expensive to work in public-facing areas of the building while it is closed to the public. Projects include a new ramp for accessible entry to back-of-house portions of the Museum, and converting offices to an exhibition gallery.

How can we afford to keep this many staff and stay closed? It poses major challenges, but we are fortunate to have diversified sources of income. Our scientific staff also run consulting businesses, which return significant funding to the Museum to maintain our collections and provide general operating support. We have an active program of grants to support projects, related salaries, and experimental projects.

Philanthropy always plays a major role in our annual budgets, and this year in particular, successful fundraising will be critical. We are privileged to have a supportive community that helped us meet a $500k challenge grant, closing the $1M gap generated by our closure in July and August of this year.

We entered the closure last spring from a position of financial strength, carefully managed our cash, and were able to secure a forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loan from the U.S Small Business Association. We instituted austerity measures by limiting spending, cutting back on work by our as-needed part time staff, and after we re-closed in July, we furloughed most frontline staff. We’re still closely monitoring our cash, analyzing scenarios that move our reopening date back in 2021, and understanding whether we can reopen on select days around the holiday season.

It was a bold and potentially risky move to keep the Museum closed and focus on actions online and in nature, a decision that was made possible through support from a visionary board and staff. On the other hand, it gives us the impetus to refocus our efforts where they will make the most impact.  This is challenging work that requires retooling and rethinking. We feel that, in the future, our model will need to blend onsite, online, and nature-based activities, and this extended closure gives us the opportunity to develop the skills and tools we need to get there. Ultimately, the hope is that we will emerge from the pandemic stronger. We are in a chrysalis, not crawling into a burrow to hibernate, and when we emerge we will have grown, strengthened and transformed.

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Reposted from Artnet News

Last week, the Queens Museum reopened to the public for the first time in just over six months. Like other institutions across New York, the museum took a financial hit due to its extended closure, but the effects of the virus were particularly damaging in its home of Corona, Queens, and can still be felt to this day.

That’s why, even as the museum unveils a slate of new exhibitions, it is also operating as a food pantry.

Partnering with La Jornada, a volunteer-led hunger-relief organization from nearby Flushing, and the Together We Can Community Resource Center, a local nonprofit, the Queens Museum is continuing weekly Wednesday food distributions for Corona residents, which began on June 17, for the foreseeable future.

“The food pantry is doing essential work, to provide food for families in our immediate neighborhood as long as we can and as long as it’s needed,” Sally Tallant, the museum’s director, told Artnet News. “And I’m sad to say I think it’s going to be needed longer than any of us would have expected in a first-world country.”

As the epicenter of New York City’s outbreak, the neighborhood of Corona has had 5,156 documented virus cases to date, or one for every 22 people, according to the New York Times. Of those, 447 people have died.

With 63 percent of its residents foreign-born—more than any other zip code in the city—and a substantial number of those undocumented, Corona has a large population that was ineligible for federal relief, such as expanded unemployment benefits and stimulus checks. A quarter of residents lack health care. Many are essential workers whose jobs required them to work on the front lines.

It did not take long for the museum to realize that Corona was bearing the brunt of the burden, and it quickly took action.

“When people started to get sick back in March, we formed a coalition with the Hall of Science, the Queens Theater, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, and a number of community organizations to try and work out what we could do collectively to support our community at that time,” Tallant said.

Thanks to the museum’s community organizer, Gianina Enriquez, the museum already had a relationship with La Jornada, and was ready to respond to growing food insecurity in the neighborhood.

“What’s really evident on Wednesdays when the collection is happening is that there’s an incredible need,” Tallant said.

To date, the Queens Museum has fed 9,650 families in Corona, and hopes to scale up to be able to feed 1,000 families a week. Nor is it the only museum to spring into action as a food pantry: the Brooklyn Museum has also been hosting a food-distribution center.

Tallant also hopes that food-pantry beneficiaries will stick around to visit the museum now that the galleries are open again.

“We’ve made the museum free admission at this time,” Tallant said. “We don’t want to put any financial barriers in the way.”

But she understands if visitors’ return is gradual. “All of us are trying to relearn how to be back in the world with some trepidation,” Tallant acknowledged. “This is a very scary moment globally.”

The institution is offering a quartet of fall exhibitions, including an outdoor installation from New York City Department of Sanitation artist-in-residence Mierle Laderman Ukeles thanking service workers for their tireless work.

With work by 12 artists, another show, titled “After the Plaster Foundation, or, ‘Where can we live?’” looks at housing politics, home ownership, and eviction issues. A show of recently donated photographs, “Bruce Davidson: Outsider on the Inside,” features a series of photos documenting the Civil Rights Movement in New York.

“Bruce Davidson took amazing pictures of New York and it seems really pertinent to look at the city and how it’s changed over time,” Tallant said. “The exhibitions all feel incredibly timely.”

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