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The Washington courts in the US are suffering outages after detecting suspicious unauthorised activity on their network.
Washington courts announced in a statement on social media that they had detected unauthorised activity and took action, resulting in outages.
“The Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) recently identified unauthorised activity on the Washington courts network. We have taken immediate action to secure critical systems and are working to safely restore service,” it said on Facebook.
“Please be advised that there will be intermittent impacts to accessibility of our public website and systems in the coming days as we continue to restore services. We apologise for any inconvenience.”
At this stage, the Washington AOC has not responded to media requests for comment and has thus not yet disclosed the nature of the incident.
However, associate director for the AOC Wendy Ferrell said the systems were taken down “for security reasons” but that the investigation uncovered “no reason to believe that [this] was a targeted attack”.
At the time of writing, Cyber Daily has observed that the Washington courts’ website is still down and has reportedly been since Sunday, 3 November.
The outages have also affected the courts in the Washington counties of Monroe, Renton, Bainbridge, Thurston, Pierce, King, Lewis, Whatcom, and Puyallup, as well as several city municipal courts.
As a result, courts have said that some areas, such as phone systems, fine paying platforms, and electronic filing systems, are down.
Pierce County Superior Court said on Monday (4 November) that the court was still operating normally, while Thurston County District Court told those with a scheduled infraction hearing that they would be sent new dates and would not be required to attend upcoming dates.
Cyber Daily has yet to observe any threat actors claiming responsibility for the incident. This story will be updated as it continues to develop.
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