Yesterday it was reported that Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul court system was hit by a cyberattack, today another court system has fallen victim to a similar attack. After malware was found on their servers and believed to have affected around 3,000 computers, the Alaska Court System (ACS) went offline in order to limit further risk. On top of their website being down, the court system is also facing issues with the ability of the public to view court hearings over Zoom, online bail payments, submitting juror questionnaires and sending or receiving emails to or from an ACS email address. Despite the inconveniences, the court says they will continue on with jury trials and emergency hearings, but there’s no timeframe for the suspended services to come back online. Authorities have been notified and the ACS is working with cybersecurity professionals in an effort understand the scope of the attack. It is unclear what the attackers’ intentions were at this time and the identity of the threat group that may have been behind the attack has not yet been released. At this time, they do not believe that any court documents, employee information, or payment information has been tampered with.
Analyst Notes
It is unclear what type of protections ACS had in place or how the attack made its way into their servers. To lower the risk of being affected by these types of issues, Binary Defense suggests pairing a well-known anti-virus solution with endpoint detection and response (EDR). At Binary Defense, our Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts monitor endpoints day in and day out in an effort to spot signs of an intrusions and work with clients to reduce any threat from computer intrusions.
Source: https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/551463-alaska-court-system-forced-offline-by-cyberattack?&web_view=true
