Following a closed-door briefing from representatives of the Kansas Judiciary System Wednesday, Rep. Kyle Hoffman, a Coldwater Republican who chairs the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Information Technology, said recovery of the system could be “a long process”
“I hope it’s not a year,” Hoffman said when asked whether long denoted months or years.
Courts have been operating entirely on paper since the system went down, slowing down civil and criminal cases while impeding parents’ ability to access child support payments and background checks that need to use the court system.
But the Kansas Judiciary has released relatively little information about the incident. A spokeswoman for the state has said she cannot answer questions at this stage about what caused the breakdown, whether there was a data breach, or when the system will be online. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation is working with federal law enforcement to investigate the security incident.
In a brief statement following the closed door meeting, Marisa Bayless, special counsel to Chief Justice Marla Luckert, thanked Kansans for their patience. The system, she said, would likely be brought back online in phases as the judiciary works to create public portals for individuals in the Kansas Judicial Centers and clerk stations at courts.
“We know that this is a difficult process, it’s not ideal and we understand that. We are going to continue examining our systems, understanding what happened, how it happened and how we can bring the system back online in a very safe environment,” Bayless said. “We want that to be done as quickly as possible but the priority right now is safety.”
Statewide concerns
The continued shutdown has raised questions over information security in the judiciary system and across state systems.
“There’s been flags along the way that we need to ramp up the technology services for the state of Kansas,” Sen. Caryn Tyson, a Parker Republican said. She added that, by now, the court should have sent notices to Kansans whose information is stored in the system that a data breach may have occurred.
The security incident comes months after Kansas finished a years-long process of centralizing the court system into one online system called Odyssey. T, the Judiciary hired Dallas-based Tyler Technologies to run the project in 2018. The only county not affected by the shutdown is Johnson County, which had not yet moved over to the central system.
Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey system was the target of a major data breach in California last year when personal information of roughly 250,000 attorneys was leaked. In 2020 the company itself was targeted with ransomware.
Doug Jacobson, Director of the Center for Cybersecurity Innovation and Outreach at Iowa State University, said that prior breach could speak to a vulnerability in Tyler’s systems or to a motivation by hacker groups to get into that system because they know their way around it. But without more information that is hard to say for sure, he said.
“Some people say there’s no such thing as a coincidence,” Jacobson said.
Hoffman said it’s unclear whether the Odyssey system itself was targeted.
“We do have to be careful because we don’t know that that’s where the breach came from,” Hoffman said. “We can’t necessarily pin it on them.”
Lawmakers are viewing the situation as a warning to other government entities in the state.
“I’m afraid we’ll have more of this happen,” said Rep. Kyle Hoffman, a Coldwater Republican who leads the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Information Technology. “I think that bad actors are out there and they’ll continue to try to disrupt.”
“They probably got some information from some different sources, maybe with this breach. But I think the biggest thing is that they did it to disrupt. They disrupted a huge part of the government.”
Last year, the Judiciary was one of 20 state systems audited for its IT security protocol between 2020 and 2022. The audit itself is confidential. But a public report on all the audits showed major vulnerabilities across the 20 audited agencies.
Lawmakers on the IT committee reviewed the audits Wednesday in closed session. Hoffman described the court’s 2020 audit as “terrible” but said results were “better” in subsequent audits.
Rep. Sean Tarwater, a Stillwell Republican, said that a recent update lawmakers received on that audit indicated that, of 138 vulnerabilities statewide, only 70 had been addressed.
“I’m concerned for each and every agency we reviewed that hasn’t completely fixed all the findings we had,” Tarwater said.
Sen. Ethan Corson, a Fairway Democrat who sits on the post audit committee, said he believed agencies were working to get up to speed. He said he hoped the state could learn from the Judiciary’s experience.
“You always have challenges of moving a large agency or department but also resource challenges,” he said. “I don’t get the sense by any stretch that these agencies are thumbing their nose at it or not taking it seriously.”
The amount of time the Judiciary system has been down is not unusual. Because the system can operate in paper, he said, it is likely officials will spend more time evaluating what happened before devoting resources to resolving it.
Kansans, he said, may never know exactly what happened. But the amount of time the system has been down is normal for a cyber attack.
“If they’re able to operate without the systems then the urgency seems to be more on doing a very thorough job of figuring out what was taken,” Jacobson said.
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