A cyberattack on BAE Systems has knocked out the US Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), the service that produces and sends official notices and orders for every federal bankruptcy court in the country.
According to a notice on the federal courts website, BAE operates the BNC's systems and websites on behalf of the judiciary. All of them went offline: bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov and the National Creditor Registration Service. The incident also halted production and distribution of bankruptcy notices. The Administrative Office of the US Courts is coordinating with affected courts and with BAE, which is investigating and working to restore service.
BAE said the incident is "isolated to the BNC system" and that it took immediate steps to address it. That is the company's own characterization, and no one has published details on attribution or on whether any data was exposed.
The outage is operational rather than, so far, a confirmed theft. Bankruptcy notices tell creditors about hearings, claims and case developments, so a pause in them matters even if no files left the building. BAE is a large defense and security contractor, with about $40.91 billion in 2025 sales and more than 111,000 employees, which makes the target an awkward one for a company that sells cybersecurity services to governments.
The BNC incident joins a run of court-related breaches this year. In March 2026, attackers broke into C-Track, a court case-management system run by Thomson Reuters, which disclosed the intrusion in September 2026. In August 2026, the judiciary confirmed "escalated cyberattacks of a sophisticated and persistent nature" aimed at its case management system. Separately, the Arizona Supreme Court lost data on 1.3 million people after an employee allegedly clicked a malicious email link.
The notice does not tie the BNC incident to any of those. The open question is whether this is another entry in a pattern or simply another soft target among many.