“Judges are already compensating, extending deadlines and continuing hearings district by district. That is the detail that should worry anyone procuring for the courts. The outage never touched a courtroom, yet it rewrote the calendar of every bankruptcy case in the country, because a vendor bought like routine IT has become load-bearing infrastructure for the justice system.

“Restoring service is the urgent job. The standing question is why the noticing architecture has no alternate path, and I would want the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to write continuity requirements into the next BAE contract as strict as the ones the courts impose on themselves.”

John Strand, Owner of Black Hills Information Security, adds, “This story highlights how unbelievably interconnected business and government processes actually are. A lot of people still think about computer security in terms of a DMZ. There’s an internal network to protect and an outside world to protect it from.

“But look at any modern large organization. They have multiple SaaS platforms, third-party integrations, and customer data flowing in and out of systems they don’t own or control. That perimeter is a lot messier than people want to believe.

“I still don’t think the industry has caught up with the risks we introduced through cloud computing and SaaS. Now we’re adding AI to the mix, giving attackers new ways to target those services and exploit the connections between them. We weren’t caught up before. We’re certainly not ready now.”