A Bankruptcy Noticing Center outage has halted the production of bankruptcy notices for federal bankruptcy courts after a cybersecurity incident affecting contractor BAE Systems, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
The disruption is limited, based on the available statements, to the notice-delivery service and connected sites operated by BAE for the judiciary. It does not establish that all bankruptcy court operations or court case-management systems are offline.
What is affected by the Bankruptcy Noticing Center outage?
The Bankruptcy Noticing Center, or BNC, produces and sends bankruptcy notices for all federal bankruptcy courts, The Record reported. The Administrative Office said access to the BNC systems and websites run by BAE was unavailable.
- bnc.uscourts.gov
- bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov
- notices.uscourts.gov
- The National Creditor Registration Service
Notice production stopped as a result of the incident, according to the court administration office. The agency said it was communicating with affected courts and coordinating with BAE while the company investigated and worked to restore service.
BAE said the security incident was isolated to the BNC system and that it had taken immediate steps to address it. The company said it was working with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts on the response.
What remains unknown
The available statements do not identify who carried out the attack, how BAE's system was compromised, whether any information was accessed or removed, or when the services will return. The Administrative Office did not provide further details on the incident or say whether data had been stolen, The Record reported.
That leaves a fairly important distinction intact: a confirmed interruption to a nationwide court-noticing service is not, on its own, evidence of a broader breach of court files or a shutdown of the federal bankruptcy courts.
The outage follows prior security concerns involving court systems. Federal court officials had previously said they were strengthening protections for sensitive documents and case files after earlier attacks, according to The Record. Those earlier incidents do not establish a connection to the BNC disruption.
For now, the confirmed operational effect is narrower but concrete: BAE's BNC services are unavailable, and the federal judiciary's bankruptcy-notice production has stopped pending restoration.
This story draws on original reporting from The Record.
