Russia is after secret files in the US court system, according to reports this week—and its hackers appear to have reached at least some of them.
Last week, news broke of a successful cyberattack against the decades-old US court filing system. Called Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF), courts use the system to file and maintain documentation for legal cases around the country, which in turn can be accessed through a public portal called PACER. The attack happened as early ago as the first week of July, and possibly before that.
Now, investigators say that Russia is at least partly responsible for the hack, which they described in the New York Times as a multi-year effort to compromise the system.
What would Russian hackers be looking for? Many court documents are accessible via PACER for a small fee (or via other sites such as CourtListener for free). But CM/ECF also hosts many sensitive, sealed documents that are not available to the general public. These would be a treasure trove to those with criminal and/or nation-state connections.
Indeed, the targeted documents were those with overseas ties, according to the NYT report, which said that the attack has targeted at least eight district courts. Chief judges there were asked to move sensitive cases out of CM/ECF. At least one judge, for the Eastern District of New York, issued an order forbidding sealed documents to be directly uploaded there.
Experts have already warned that court files are the crown jewels for cyber attackers.
“Experience has shown that the Judiciary is a high-value target for malicious actors and cyber criminals seeking to misappropriate confidential information and disrupt the judicial process in the United States,” said Michael Y. Scudder Jr., chair of the Committee on IT of the Judicial Conference on Courts, testifying to Congress in June this year.
He mentioned that in 2024 alone, the judiciary’s security team blocked 200 million harmful events from reaching local court networks, adding that attacks were becoming more sophisticated over time.
This isn’t the first time that attackers have made it through the filing system’s defenses. In 2021, CM/ECF suffered a major cybersecurity breach, as reported by the Judiciary at the time, later revealed to have involved three hostile foreign actors, per Politico.
The Judiciary is also in the process of modernizing the filing system, Scudder said. That would mean replacing CM/ECF, which was first introduced in the mid-nineties. PACER is also up for replacement.
However, a replacement has been on the cards since at least 2022, when the Judiciary discussed its refresh plans.
The US government runs on technology systems, having moved away from paper. But those systems are often in dire need of modernization. In July, the US Government Accountability Office released an update to a 2019 audit of government IT systems. Of the ten critical legacy systems most in need of modernization back then, only three have been addressed as of this February. Some of the oldest legacy systems, operated by the Department of Defense and the Treasury, date back to before Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon.
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