A cyber incident affecting BAE Systems has disrupted the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), halting the generation and dispatch of notices to federal bankruptcy courts across the United States for about a week. The BNC is used by every federal bankruptcy court and is operated by BAE Systems under contract to the Judiciary.
The Administrative Office of the United States Courts said access to the BNC systems and related websites is currently unavailable, which has stopped the notices, including the electronic creditor mailing lists generated for serving documents via the courts’ filing system. The outage began after BAE reported the problem late on 9 October, and several courts subsequently described the disruption as a service interruption rather than a cyber event, though BAE says the issue is a security incident isolated to the BNC.
What is affected includes the National Creditor Registration Service, which prevents the courts’ electronic filing system from producing creditor mailing lists while offline. The judiciary continues to accept filings and open new cases, and electronic filing notifications to registered attorneys, trustees and the US Trustee may still be sent in some parts of the system.
At the time of reporting, the Administrative Office was coordinating with BAE while the company investigates the incident and works to restore functionality. Neither the judiciary nor BAE have disclosed a cause or whether any data was compromised, and there is no estimated timeline for when services will be fully restored.