Cyberattack on contractor BAE Systems knocks out the U.S. courts' bankruptcy noticing service

On 15 October 2026, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC) — the central administrative body of the U.S. federal judiciary — disclosed that a cyberattack on its contractor BAE Systems had taken down the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), the system BAE operates on the Judiciary's behalf to produce and distribute the formal notices that bankruptcy courts are required to send to creditors and other parties. According to the office, the attack halted the BNC's noticing process, and it said it was "coordinating with BAE Systems," which was "actively investigating this incident and working to restore operations."

With the BNC offline, a cluster of official court services became unreachable, including the public noticing sites bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov and notices.uscourts.gov, as well as the National Creditor Registration Service used by creditors to manage how they receive notices. Because bankruptcy notices carry legal deadlines for creditors and debtors, an interruption to their generation and delivery has direct consequences for ongoing cases across the federal bankruptcy system.

A contractor-side incident

In a statement the following day, BAE Systems characterised the event as "isolated to the BNC system" and said it was coordinating with the AOUSC on the response. No threat actor had claimed responsibility, the nature of the intrusion had not been publicly characterised, and the office did not confirm any theft of case data in connection with the BNC attack as of its initial disclosure.

Context

The disruption is distinct from the separate 2025 reporting about intrusions into the Judiciary's CM/ECF case-management and PACER systems, and the AOUSC's statement about the BNC did not address those earlier claims. The incident nonetheless underscores the Judiciary's reliance on outside contractors for core operational systems: a compromise at a single vendor was enough to suspend a nationwide court service, with restoration timing left dependent on BAE's investigation.