L.A. County Superior Court hit by ransomware attack, believed to be unrelated to CrowdStrike outage

The Los Angeles County Superior Court system was hit by a ransomware attack Friday morning, prompting officials to disable network systems through at least the weekend.

The attack does not appear related to the faulty CrowdStrike update that sparked a global technology outage Friday, officials said in a statement.

CrowdStrike is a major supplier of software meant to protect businesses from ransomware, in which an attacker encrypts and blocks access to computer systems or data until some sort of payment is made. Law enforcement is investigating the attack on the court and so far there’s “no evidence of court [users’] data being compromised,” the statement said.

After discovering the attack, the court’s network systems were disabled to minimize the damage, according to the statement. Those systems are expected to be offline through at least the weekend to address the issue.

Officials did not specify which “network systems” had been disabled. However, as of Friday evening, multiple pages on the court’s website weren’t working and returned error messages, including the jury portal.