A Cyberattack at Defense Giant BAE Systems Has Halted Notices From Every US Bankruptcy Court for a Week

Since October 9, not a single notice has gone out from any federal bankruptcy court in the United States. No paper letters, no electronic notices. The system that tells creditors and debtors about hearings and deadlines has gone quiet, and the websites that normally carry that information are dark.

The cause is a cybersecurity incident at BAE Systems, one of the largest defense contractors in the world, which runs the system that sends those notices on behalf of the federal judiciary. A week in, nobody has said what kind of incident it was, whether any data was touched, or when service will return.

The pipe every bankruptcy case depends on

The Bankruptcy Noticing Center, or BNC, produces and transmits bankruptcy notices for all federal bankruptcy courts. On Thursday the Administrative Office of the US Courts confirmed it was down.

"As a result of the incident, all access to the BNC systems and websites that BAE operates on behalf of the judiciary and the related bankruptcy noticing process are unavailable at this time," the office said, listing bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov and the National Creditor Registration Service. "The incident has also halted the BNC's production and distribution of bankruptcy notices for bankruptcy courts."

The courts themselves are still working. They accept filings, open cases and process documents. What stopped is the machinery that tells people about any of it.

A slow, vague disclosure

The first public word came Tuesday, in a note on the US Bankruptcy Court website describing a "nationwide service interruption." It did not mention cyber activity. The phrase cybersecurity incident appeared only in Thursday's statement, CyberScoop notes, and as of Friday the sites were still offline.

BAE kept its own statement short. "We are aware of a security incident that is isolated to the BNC system and have taken immediate steps to address it," the company told The Register, adding that it is coordinating closely with the courts' administrative office on the response. The judiciary says BAE is investigating and working to restore operations. CISA referred questions to the US Courts, and the FBI did not respond.

Neither announcement named a cause, said whether information was accessed, or offered a restoration estimate.

Courts improvise

Judges and clerks are now patching around the gap. The Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which dated the trouble to October 9, issued a general order adding 30 days to the stay for any case filed on or after September 14 with an active motion to stay.

Other workarounds come with fine print. In a notice, Clerk of Court Joe Falzone said people who must serve documents can search the courts' electronic filing system for creditor and party addresses and compare the lists. But those lists may not include addresses registered through the BNC's Electronic Bankruptcy Noticing program or the National Creditor Registration Service. Some people entitled to notice, in other words, might not show up at all.

In bankruptcy that is not a clerical detail. Notice is how creditors learn they can object, file claims or show up before their rights are decided.

Courts keep getting hit

The outage lands in a bad stretch for the courts and the contractors that serve the government. The federal judiciary's electronic case filing system suffered a major breach in 2025 that officials feared exposed the identities of confidential informants, and the docketing system was attacked in early 2020. Arizona's state court system was breached weeks ago, leaking information on more than 1.3 million people. In September, a breach at Thomson Reuters' C-Track case management system exposed some US and Canadian court records through the vendor's cloud.

Contractors are a recurring weak point. On Wednesday the Department of Transportation confirmed that a safety agency contact center went offline after a contractor was hit by a cyberattack. ShinyHunters attacked the FBI in September.

For now, every bankruptcy court in the country is waiting on BAE to say when the notices can start flowing again.

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