Washington courts face outages following ‘unauthorized activity’
US courts in Washington are experiencing outages after suspicious and unauthorized activity was detected on their network.
The Washington courts announced in a statement on social media that they had detected unauthorized activity and taken action, leading to outages.
“The Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) recently identified unauthorized activity on the Washington court system. We have taken immediate action to secure critical systems and are working to safely restore service,” it said on Facebook.
“Please note that there will be intermittent impacts to the accessibility of our public website and systems in the coming days as we continue to restore services. We apologize for any inconvenience.
At this point, Washington AOC has not responded to media requests for comment and therefore has not yet disclosed the nature of the incident.
However, AOC Associate Director Wendy Ferrell said the systems were taken down “for security reasons” but that the investigation found “no reason to believe that [this] It was a targeted attack.”
At the time of writing, Cyber Daily noted that the Washington Courts website was still down, having been since Sunday, November 3.
The outages also affected courts in Washington counties of Monroe, Renton, Bainbridge, Thurston, Pierce, King, Lewis, Whatcom and Puyallup, as well as several municipal courts.
As a result, courts declared certain areas, such as telephone systems, fine payment platforms and electronic filing systems, to be broken.
Pierce County Superior Court said Monday, Nov. 4, that the court was still operating normally, while Thurston County District Court told people with a scheduled infraction hearing they would be given new dates and would not be not required to attend future dates.
Cyber Daily has yet to observe any threat actors claiming responsibility for the incident. This story will be updated as it develops.
