The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said on Thursday that a cyberattack on BAE Systems has disrupted the Bankruptcy Noticing Center, The Record reported. The center makes and sends bankruptcy notices for every federal bankruptcy court. BAE, a British company, runs it and its websites for the courts. Those sites and the National Creditor Registration Service are all offline. Notice production has stopped. BAE said the incident is limited to this one system.
Much is still unknown. The office did not answer The Record's questions about the type of attack or whether data was stolen. No date for bringing the system back has been given. BAE said it is investigating and working to restore service. The Record does not say what the halt means for creditors or deadlines. It also noted that a contractor attack took a Department of Transportation safety contact center offline on Wednesday, and that the federal courts' docketing system was attacked in early 2020. The report ties neither to this case.
The courts gave one national task to one contractor-run platform. When it stopped, notices stopped in every bankruptcy court at once. For software buyers, that is the cost of a single operator: one incident reaches every user.