Cyber incident halts U.S. bankruptcy notices nationwide

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts says a cybersecurity incident affected the IT and websites BAE Systems operates for the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC). The BNC produces and transmits notices for every federal bankruptcy court. In its October 15 notice, the Judiciary said BNC access and the related noticing process were unavailable and production and distribution of bankruptcy notices had stopped. (Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts)

The Southern District of New York bankruptcy court says the nationwide disruption began October 9. It interrupted the BNC’s processing and delivery of court notices and orders and affected CM/ECF users’ ability to generate and print creditor lists. The same court says Notices of Electronic Filing (NEFs) continue to be generated and distributed through CM/ECF. A separate notice from the District of South Carolina says ordinary electronic and paper notice delivery is interrupted and directs users to its operating order for court-specific procedures. (Southern District of New York bankruptcy court; District of South Carolina bankruptcy court)

That distinction matters for incident response: the national notice-delivery service and the CM/ECF filing-notification emails are separate functions. The court notices describe an availability disruption to BNC systems; they do not say that each court’s case-management system was compromised. The District of South Carolina also says court-served notices and orders are reflected in separate docket entries linked to the relevant event. Users should follow the current instructions and orders from the court handling each case.

The Judiciary has not publicly described the access path, malware, affected data, or whether information was accessed or taken. BAE Systems was still investigating and working to restore operations in the Judiciary’s notice. A BAE Systems spokesperson told Reuters on October 16 that the incident was isolated to the BNC system; that company statement does not establish the data impact or provide a technical account of the incident. (Reuters)

The disruption illustrates the operational risk when a national court-notice channel depends on a contractor-operated service. Court administrators and organizations that rely on notices need a way to distinguish notice-delivery status from filing-system status, and a documented contingency for checking case dockets and court-specific orders during an outage.