Technical Glitch Cripples US Federal Courts

The US federal court system suffered from technical issues on Friday which temporarily blocked access to websites, electronic document filing and public record access services. A hacker groups claimed to have caused the problem, but the FBI has denied there was an attack.

The uscourts.gov website, the public hub for the federal judiciary, went down alongside many smaller online resources. A spokesman for the Administrative Office of the US Courts told the news website Politico that the incident was caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. However, the FBI later issued a statement in which it said it was the result of a problem with the federal court systems, and not the work of hackers.

That didn’t stop a group calling itself the European Cyber Army from taking credit for the so-called DDoS attack.

Conflicting reports

According to Politico, the attack (or glitch) took out large parts of the federal court online infrastructure including PACER, a system which provides on-line access to US Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy court records and documents.

As a result, the attorneys couldn’t submit documents, and judges couldn’t access court records. The outage began around 3:22pm EST and access was restored around 7pm EST. The Supreme Court was not affected.

The Justice Department authorities have launched an investigation into the matter.

Meanwhile, a group calling itself the European Cyber Army (ECA) claimed to have made a DDoS attack against the federal courts. Since the beginning of January, this organisation has been disrupting various sites in the US, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, most notably Syria.

In the past, ECA has proven to be very indiscriminate when choosing targets, assaulting anything from Hobby King and Virgin Atlantic to the Bank of Japan, gaming news website N4G and Calgary Herald.

Government of #USA! We have taken the liberty of #Nuking your website http://t.co/skUNGyiQDT! We are the #ECA #EuropeanCyberArmy

— European Cyber Army (@ECA_Legion) January 24, 2014

According to the Washington Post, the FBI, which previously denied hacker involvement, is now “re-assessing” its initial analysis.

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