LA County Superior Court hit by ransomware attack as the rest of the world was reeling from the CrowdStrike outage

The Los Angeles County Superior Court experienced a ransomware attack on Friday morning, July 19 2024. The attack is believed to be unrelated to the global technology outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update, which disrupted numerous computer systems worldwide on the same day.

Upon discovering the attack, the court's network systems were disabled to limit further harm. The systems are expected to remain offline through at least the weekend to address the issue. Multiple parts of the court's website, including the jury portal, were down and returned error messages as a result of the disabled systems.

The court is receiving support from the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, as well as local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, to investigate the breach and mitigate its impacts.

The exposed data types and the number of affected individuals are not disclosed. Preliminary investigation shows no evidence of court users' data being compromised. Officials credit their ability to quickly detect and respond to the intrusion to significant investments in cybersecurity infrastructure over the past few years.

Update - On 21st of July 2024 the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, announced they will close all courthouse locations on Monday, 22nd of July to restore systems affected by the Friday ransomware attack.
"With many of the Court's network systems still inaccessible as of Sunday evening, the Court will close tomorrow in order to provide one additional day to get essential networks back online," a statement issued on Sunday reads.

The Court maintains that it found no evidence of a data breach on the compromised systems.