politico.com - The identities of confidential court informants are feared compromised in a series of breaches across multiple U.S. states.

The electronic case filing system used by the federal judiciary has been breached in a sweeping cyber intrusion that is believed to have exposed sensitive court data across multiple U.S. states, according to two people with knowledge of the incident.

The hack, which has not been previously reported, is feared to have compromised the identities of confidential informants involved in criminal cases at multiple federal district courts, said the two people, both of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the hack.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — which manages the federal court filing system — first determined how serious the issue was around July 4, said the first person. But the office, along with the Justice Department and individual district courts around the country, is still trying to determine the full extent of the incident.

It is not immediately clear who is behind the hack, though nation-state-affiliated actors are widely suspected, the people said. Criminal organizations may also have been involved, they added.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts declined to comment. Asked whether it is investigating the incident, the FBI referred POLITICO to the Justice Department. The Justice Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

It is not immediately clear how the hackers got in, but the incident is known to affect the judiciary’s federal core case management system, which includes two overlapping components: Case Management/Electronic Case Files, or CM/ECF, which legal professionals use to upload and manage case documents; and PACER, a system that gives the public limited access to the same data.

In addition to records on witnesses and defendants cooperating with law enforcement, the filing system includes other sensitive information potentially of interest to foreign hackers or criminals, such as sealed indictments detailing non-public information about alleged crimes, and arrests and search warrants that criminal suspects could use to evade capture.

Chief judges of the federal courts in the 8th Circuit — which includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota — were briefed on the hack at a judicial conference last week in Kansas City, said the two people. It is unclear who delivered the brief, though the Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Judge Robert J. Conrad, Jr., was in attendance, per the first person. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was also in attendance but didn’t address the breach in his remarks.

Staff for Conrad, a district judge in the Western District of North Carolina, declined to comment.

The hack is the latest sign that the federal court filing system is struggling to keep pace with a rising wave of cybersecurity threats.

Switzerland says a ransomware attack on the non-profit health foundation Radix that involved data being stolen and encrypted had also affected the federal administration.
The Radix Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation active in the field of health promotion, has been the victim of a ransomware attack, it was confirmed on Monday. The criminals stole and encrypted data, which they then published on the darknet.

The foundation contacted the National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC) after carrying out an initial analysis of the situation, it announced on Monday. Radix’s clientele also includes various administrative units of the federal administration.

The aim is to determine which services and data are actually affected by the cyber attack. At no time were the hackers able to penetrate the systems of the federal administration, as the Radix Foundation itself does not have such direct access, the centre pointed out.

Roughly 16% of Swiss federal politicians had their official government email leaked on the dark web. This puts them at risk of phishing attacks or blackmail.

In the latest installment of our investigation into politicians’ cybersecurity practices, we found the official government email addresses of 44 Swiss politicians for sale on the dark web, roughly 16% of the 277 emails we searched. Constella Intelligence(new window) helped us compile this information.

Sharp-eyed readers might wonder why we searched for 277 email addresses if there are only 253 politicians between the Council of States, Federal Council, and National Council. The explanation is some politicians publicly share another email address along with their official government one. In these cases, we searched for both.

Since these email addresses are all publicly available, it’s not an issue that they’re on the dark web. However, it is an issue that they appear in data breaches, meaning Swiss politicians violated cybersecurity best practices and used their official emails to create accounts with services like Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Adobe, although there is evidence some Swiss politicians used their government email address to sign up for adult and dating platforms.

We’re not sharing identifying information for obvious reasons, and we notified every affected politician before we published this article.
Swiss politicians performed roughly as well as their European colleagues, having few fewer elected officials with exposed information than the UK (68%), the European Parliament (41%), and France (18%), and only slightly more than Italy (15%).

It should be noted that even a single compromised account could have significant ramifications on national security. And this isn’t a hypothetical. The Swiss government is actively being targeted on a regular basis. In 2025, hackers used DDoS attacks(new window) to knock the Swiss Federal Administration’s telephones, websites, and services offline. In 2024, Switzerland’s National Cyber Security Center published a report stating the Play ransomware group stole 65,000 government documents(new window) containing classified information from a government provider.

Top U.S. cybersecurity officials confirmed Thursday that several federal agencies have been impacted by cyberattacks on the widely used MOVEit file transfer tool.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly told reporters that her team and the FBI are working to provide assistance to federal agencies that used MOVEit, which is being exploited by the Russia-based Clop ransomware gang in a widespread breach that appears to have compromised dozens of entities.

“We’ve been working closely with Progress Software [which makes MOVEit], the FBI and our federal partners to understand its prevalence within federal agencies,” she said. Earlier in the day, CNN first reported that several government agencies were compromised in the hacks. Easterly said that CISA is providing support to “several agencies that have experienced intrusions of their MOVEit applications.”