Federal bankruptcy courts dealing with outages after contractor cyberattack

A cyberattack on a U.S. government contractor has impacted the platform used by all federal bankruptcy courts across the country. 

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts published a statement on Thursday afternoon warning that a cyberattack on British multinational BAE Systems disrupted the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC) — a system that produces and transmits bankruptcy notices for all federal bankruptcy courts.

“The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has been in communication with the impacted courts and is also coordinating with BAE Systems. BAE is actively investigating this incident and working to restore operations,” officials said. 

“As a result of the incident, all access to the BNC systems and websites that BAE operates on behalf of the judiciary and the related bankruptcy noticing process are unavailable at this time, including bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov, and the National Creditor Registration Service.”

The incident has halted all production of bankruptcy notices as well. The office did not respond to requests for further details about the nature of the incident or whether data was stolen.

BAE Systems is one of the largest defense contractors in the world and is deeply embedded in the U.S. Government — providing aerospace, weapons and information security services across several federal departments. 

A spokesperson for the company said they are “aware of a security incident that is isolated to the BNC system and have taken immediate steps to address it.” 

“We are coordinating closely with [the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts] on the response,” they added.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which typically handles cyberattacks on federal agencies, directed Recorded Future News to the U.S. Courts. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.

The attack on the bankruptcy court system comes weeks after Arizona’s state court system was breached and the information of more than 1.3 million people was leaked. 

Last year, U.S. federal court officials said they were working to bolster online security for sensitive documents and other case files in an attempt to block cyberattacks and data breaches. The move followed a major hack of the courts’ case filing system which officials feared exposed the identities of confidential informants in criminal cases.

The federal courts docketing system was also attacked by hackers in early 2020. 

The U.S. government has been battered by cyberattacks in recent weeks, with incidents involving the Defense Department and the FBI.

On Wednesday, the Department of Transportation confirmed that a safety agency contact center was temporarily taken offline after a contractor was hit with a cyberattack.