The US federal court system was hit by a major cyber breach in 2020, unrelated to the SolarWinds attack, which a US congressman on Thursday called “incredibly significant and complex.”.
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At a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, noted that the Administrative Office of the Courts released a statement about the breach on January 6, 2021. However, he also said the following: “It was only in March of this year that the committee first learned of the astonishing scope and extent of the court’s Document Management System security failure. Of course, even more troubling is the impact the security breach had on pending civil and criminal trials, as well as on ongoing national security.”
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The breach, Nadler said, "has had lingering effects on the department and other agencies ever since.".
Nadler asked Justice Department official Matt Olsen what types of cases, investigations or U.S. law firms affected by the breach.
Olsen, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's National Security Division, said he could not speak directly about the nature of an ongoing investigation into the efforts to hack public court documents.
“This is a significant concern for us, given the nature of the information that courts often hold , ” he said.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said the committee needs to hear from the Justice Department how many cases were affected and how many of them were dismissed.
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The massive Kremlin-backed SolarWinds attack targeted a wide range of U.S. entities — nine federal government agencies, including the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department , as well as 100 private sector organizations. The attackers infiltrated these organizations in part by injecting malware into the Orion IT monitoring platform, a SolarWinds product. The malware was distributed via software updates sent to SolarWinds customers between March and June 2020.
Information source: zdnet.com
