14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, many of the websites of the US federal court system – including UScourts.gov and pacer.gov – suffered downtimes. The outage might have been caused by technical problems or by a cyberattack – US authorities are having difficulties deciding on which one it is.
Initially, a federal court clerk said that it was a “new national cyberattack on the judiciary.” Later, representatives of the FBI told the Wall Street Journal that the outage was caused by “technical problems in the federal court computer system.”
Later, the FBI came forward once again, saying that the agency was reassessing its initial analysis, The Washington Post reported.
A group called the European Cyber Army has taken credit for the attack on UScourts.gov. However, this doesn’t mean that they truly are the ones who have launched the attack, particularly since they made the announcement many hours after the sites had come back online.
This isn’t uncommon. Hacker groups often use this tactic to attract attention.