The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating a federal court system data breach that occurred in early 2020.

The investigation was revealed today at a House Committee on the Judiciary hearing that was considering how the Justice Department’s National Security Division was addressing threats. The hack was revealed in January 2021 when the department said it was updating procedures for highly sensitive court documents and an apparent compromise had been discovered.

Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said the committee first learned about the breadth and scope of the courts’ breach and system failure in March 2022 and the breach purportedly affected pending litigation of national security and intelligence actors. Nadler said that the breach was conducted by Russian hackers and affected a handful of federal agencies, including the Department of Justice.

The hacking was separate from the now-infamous SolarWinds hack that occurred later the same year.

Nadler asked Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen how many cases in his division were affected. In response, Olsen said that “while I can’t speak directly to the nature of the ongoing investigation of the types of threats you’ve mentioned regarding the effort to compromise the public judicial dockets, this is of course a significant concern for us given the nature of the information that’s often held by the courts.” Olsen added that he couldn’t “think of anything in particular” as far as specific cases that the incident affected.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee told Olsen that it was essential for the committee to know how many cases the breach involved. “This is a dangerous set of circumstances that have now been publicly announced and we need to know how many, and how many were dismissed,” Jackson said.

Sen. Ron Wyden took the concern further. Politico reported that he has written to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts expressing “serious concerns that the federal judiciary has hidden” the consequences of the data breach from Congress and the public.

“We’ve learned to measure risk by examining threats, vulnerabilities and the potential impact to our assets, including systems and data,” Tim Marley, vice president audit, risk and compliance, field chief information security officer at IT service management company Cerberus Cyber Sentinel Corp., told SiliconANGLE. “When you look at the ‘startling breadth and scope’ of the breach and the references to adversaries including Russia and China, it does make you question whether anyone evaluated the risk associated with this system ahead of time. If the risks were adequately identified and scored, then what sort of decision was made in response?”

Photo: Wally Gobetz/Flickr