US federal courts hit by “extremely significant” cyberattack
The 2020 cyberattack on the US federal court system turned out to be far more damaging than initially thought, and now a US congressman has called it “incredibly significant and sophisticated.”
AND hearing (opens in a new tab) On the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) touched on a data breach that was first publicly disclosed by the Administrative Office of the Courts in early January 2021.
Nadler now says the breach had a much bigger impact.
Affected matters
“It was only in March of this year that the commission first learned of the astonishing scale and extent of the failure of the court’s document management system,” Nadler said. criminal proceedings, as well as current matters related to national security or intelligence ”.
Since then, the incident has had “a sustained impact on the department and other agencies,” he added.
He then asked Justice Department official Matt Olsen about the types of cases, investigations and attorneys most affected by the violation that Olsen could not answer. “This is obviously a serious problem for us, given the nature of the information often held by the courts,” he said.
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) argued that the findings were “a dangerous set of circumstances,” adding that the Department of Justice needs to share more details about the number of cases involved and how many have been rejected.
Although this incident happened at about the same time as the famous SolarWinds attack, the two events are apparently unrelated events.
The SolarWinds attack is generally viewed as one of the most devastating supply chain cyber attacks ever to take place. After investigating the incident, the US government accused the attack of Russian state-sponsored threats.
The group obtained Microsoft 365 credentials from some SolarWinds employees via phishing and used them to contaminate a patch for one of its products during development. The contaminated patch was then moved to hundreds of thousands of endpoints (opens in a new tab) around the public and private sectors, infecting government agencies as well as some of the biggest tech companies in the world.
By: ZDNet (opens in a new tab)
