Los Angeles County court system slated to reopen Tuesday after ransomware attack

The Los Angeles County Superior Court system was shut down on Monday due to a ransomware attack at the end of last week. 

The systems brought down by the attack “span the Court’s entire operation, from external systems such as the MyJuryDuty Portal and the Court’s website to internal systems such as the Court’s case management systems,” it said in an update on Monday. 

“While the team of experts has made significant progress, there remain some challenges that are delaying progress,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “With many of the Court’s network systems still inaccessible, the Court is closed today… in order to provide one additional day to get essential networks back online.” 

Officials said they do not expect the court to be shut down any further because it is making progress in the recovery effort. All hearings being held remotely were rescheduled and all of the county’s 36 courthouses were closed as a result of the attack. 

In a statement after the attack on Friday, the court said the incident started in the early morning hours and forced them to shut down all systems. 

Presiding Judge Samantha Jessner said many critical systems were still offline as of Sunday evening. She added that one additional day “will enable the Court’s team of experts to focus exclusively on bringing our systems back online so that the Court can resume operations as expeditiously, smoothly and safely as possible.”

A court order issued on Sunday said “every electronic platform containing court data was rendered inaccessible as was any device that was connected to the internet, including the Court’s telephone systems.” 

A spokesperson for the court declined to answer questions about which ransomware gang was behind the attack.

The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services has worked alongside state and federal agencies during the recovery effort. Patricia Guerrero, chief justice of California and chair of the Judicial Council, provided details on how courts and jails would handle the outages and the trial date changes. 

The Superior Court of Los Angeles County is the largest single unified trial court in the country — with nearly 5,000 employees and hundreds of courtrooms spread across the 36 courthouses. 

Last month, Recorded Future News reported that 25 of the county’s 38 departments were successfully breached as part of a wide-ranging phishing campaign conducted in February. The county is the most populous in the United States, with nearly 10 million residents across Los Angeles and several other cities.

Hackers have continued to target the public sector legal system, with recent attacks on Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office, the Law Offices of the Public Defender in New Mexico, and New York’s Public Administrator of Queens County.

Court systems in Pennsylvania, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Nebraska, Texas, Missouri, Kansas and Illinois have all dealt with data leaks, ransomware incidents or distributed denial-of-service attacks over the last year that limited operations and caused significant issues.