Cyberattack on BAE Systems knocks out US bankruptcy court notices

A cyberattack on BAE Systems, the government contractor that operates the US federal Judiciary's bankruptcy notice infrastructure, disrupted bankruptcy court operations nationwide, the Administrative Office of the US Courts announced on October 15, 2026. The attack took down the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC) systems, halting the production and distribution of court notices that inform creditors and other parties about case developments.

The outage affected several domains BAE operates on the Judiciary's behalf, including bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, and notices.uscourts.gov, along with the National Creditor Registration Service that creditors use to register for electronic notices. With these systems down, courts lost their primary channel for keeping creditors and other parties informed about case status — a function that, left unresolved, can delay statutory deadlines tied to notice delivery in active bankruptcy proceedings.

BAE Systems, Europe's largest defense contractor, also provides enterprise IT, cloud, and cybersecurity services to government clients, making it one of several large contractors whose own security posture can become a single point of failure for the agencies that depend on it. The Administrative Office said it is in direct contact with affected courts and coordinating with BAE, which it described as "actively investigating this incident and working to restore operations." Neither the Administrative Office nor BAE named a suspected attacker or confirmed whether any data was accessed.

This is not the first cybersecurity incident to hit the federal court system. The Judiciary disclosed a breach of its case management systems, CM/ECF and PACER, in 2025, which a Politico report said may have exposed sensitive data including the identities of confidential informants in sealed filings. The Judiciary added stricter access controls for sealed documents afterward but has not confirmed the scope of that earlier breach.

The latest incident underscores a structural risk in how government relies on a small number of large contractors to run sensitive public infrastructure: a single contractor's security failure can cascade into an outage of a federal function with real legal consequences for the people the system is meant to serve, as first reported by BleepingComputer.