US federal courts hit by "incredibly significant" cyberattack

Date:
Fri, 29 Jul 2022 14:12:24 +0000

Description:
2020 attack was much bigger than first thought, with lingering impacts on other agencies

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A 2020 cyberattack against the US federal court system ended up being far
more damaging than initially thought, and has now been labelled, incredibly significant and sophisticated by a US congressman.

A hearing at the House Judiciary Committee saw Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) touch upon a data breach that was first publicly disclosed by the Administrative Office of the Courts, in early January 2021.

Nadler is now saying that the breach was a lot more impactful. Impacted cases

"It was only in March of this year the committee first learned of the startling breadth and scope of the court's Document Management System
security failure, Nadler said. And perhaps even more concerning is the disturbing impact the security breach had on pending civil and criminal litigation, as well as ongoing national security or intelligence matters."

Since then, the incident has had lingering impacts on the department and
other agencies," he added.

He further asked Justice Department official Matt Olsen about the types of cases, investigations, and attorneys, most impacted by the breach, a question which Olsen couldnt answer. "This is, of course, a significant concern for us given the nature of information often held by the courts," he said.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, (D-TX), argued that the findings were a dangerous
set of circumstances, adding that the Justice Department needs to share more details about the number of cases impacted, and how many of those were dismissed. Read more

The SolarWinds hackers are back - and smuggling malware in Google Drive

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Security bug left over 1,000 organizations open to ransomware, device

hijacking

While this incident occured at roughly the same time as the notorious SolarWinds attack , the two are apparently unrelated events.

The SolarWinds attack is generally perceived as one of the most devastating supply chain cyberattacks to ever occur. After investigating the incident,
the US government blamed Russian state-sponsored threat actors for the
attack.

The group obtained Microsoft 365 login credentials from some SolarWinds employees through phishing, and used it to taint a patch for one of its products, while in development. The tainted patch was subsequently pushed to hundreds of thousands of endpoints around public and private sectors, infecting government agencies, as well as some of the largest tech companies in the world. These are the best firewalls around

Via: ZDNet



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/us-federal-courts-hit-by-incredibly-significant -cyberattack/


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