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The San Joaquin County Superior Court has experienced significant disruptions to its digital services following a cyberattack earlier this week. Nearly all of the court’s online services were knocked offline, including phone and fax systems, websites with juror reporting instructions, e-filing platforms, and credit card payment processing.
Initially, the court notified the county’s nearly 800,000 residents about technology issues on Wednesday. By Thursday, the court confirmed that a cybersecurity incident was the cause of the outages.
In response to the attack, the court took swift action to mitigate the damage, isolating its systems from the internet to contain the threat. However, some of the court’s network remains offline as part of its ongoing efforts to address the incident.
Cybersecurity experts have been brought in to help with the investigation and remediation of the breach. While the court has not provided a specific timeline for when services will be restored, they continue to work on the recovery process. At this point, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, nor has any ransomware been identified.
This attack follows a similar incident just months ago, when the Los Angeles County Superior Court suffered a ransomware attack, causing weeks of disruption. Additionally, the city of Modesto experienced a ransomware attack last year. As cyberattacks on government entities continue to rise across California, including the recent confirmation of a second cyberattack on the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, the threat to public institutions remains a growing concern.
For organizations and government bodies, the San Joaquin County breach highlights the importance of robust cybersecurity measures and proactive threat mitigation to prevent disruptions like this from occurring. Bluefire Redteam offers expert cybersecurity solutions to help organizations defend against such attacks and protect critical infrastructure.