The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has confirmed that the recent U.S. federal court system website shutdown was due to a technical glitch and not a cyberattck as previously conjectured.
On Friday, January 24, afternoon several federal court websites were bought to a halt, including PACER - which lets one "obtain case and docket information from federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts" - and uscourts.gov, due to an outage per FBI officials. The disruption of service disallowed few attorneys from filing documents electronically, as well as reading court records.
The attack was initially attributed to a cyberattack with a group by the name of European Cyber Army (ECA) claiming responsibility for the same on Twitter.
"Government of #USA! We have taken the liberty of #Nuking your website https://USCourts.gov! We are the #ECA #EuropeanCyberArmy," read the ECA tweet.
Government of #USA! We have taken the liberty of #Nuking your website https://t.co/skUNGyiQDT! We are the #ECA #EuropeanCyberArmy
— European Cyber Army (@ECA_Legion) January 24, 2014
Per a WSJ report, a federal court system spokesperson initially labeled it as a "denial-of-service" attack.
"At first, a spokeswoman for the federal court system said the shutdowns were the result of a denial of service attack-a kind of blunt force assault that overwhelms a website's ability to handle regular users by inundating the site with meaningless traffic. She said the incident "affected an unknown number of courts around the country," as well as the systems for reading and filing court documents," per the WSJ report.
However, on Friday night an FBI spokeswoman clarified that the disruption in service was not owing to a cyberattack, but because of technical issues in the federal court computer system.
A spokesperson also told ZDNET via an e-mail that the FBI was re-evaluating its initial stance as the facts were under review.
"The FBI is prepared to assist the U.S. Federal Courts if necessary," said the spokesperson to ZDNet.
Moreover, per the site, a government official "familiar with the matter" let on that the possibility of the disruption being due to a denial-of-service attack existed.
The websites in question resumed normal functionality from Friday evening and are running smoothly as before.
