'Unusual Activity' Leaves Cook County Court Clerk's Site Disabled

CHICAGO — The website of the clerk of the second-largest court system in the United States will be offline for the next several weeks after the discovery of "unusual activity" on a server earlier this month.

The office of Cook County Clerk of Court Iris Martinez released a statement saying the website had been taken down for maintenance because "upgrades are necessary to ensure that the lack of attention by the prior administration to the applications used and security components of the website are addressed appropriately."

According to Martinez, the incident was not ransomware attack and it did not affect any personal information or actual court records. Instead, in a redirect attack discovered Aug. 13, visitors to the clerk's office website were sent to an unspecified "NFL-related website."

Martinez took over from former Clerk Dorothy Brown nine months ago after Brown declined to run for a fifth term leading the office.

The clerk's office has long faced criticism over its inefficiencies and federal criminal probes stemming from bribery allegations, which resulted in convictions for two of Brown's aides.

Martinez and Brown sparred shortly after the transition, with Brown accusing Martinez's staff of "showing disrespect to the American English language" by speaking Spanish at work, and Martinez saying the office was run "very poorly."

The case search function of the clerk's website for civil cases had already been disabled, but as of Thursday, the clerk's entire website at cookcountyclerkofcourt.org was not responding.

A spokesperson for the clerk's office has not responded to queries about whether its servers were accessed without authorization.

Even when it is operational, the website for the clerk's office does not allow online access to scanned court records other than to Cook County employees.

However, remote access to limited docket information about criminal cases was granted to licensed attorneys starting last year during Gov. J.B. Pritzker's stay-at-home order associated with the first wave of the coronavirus.

According to the clerk's office, its site is currently undergoing "software and other technology upgrades that will bring the website up-to-date for its software, security and technology."

The clerk's office remains accessible via phone, according to the statement, and an investigation with Cook County Bureau of Technology and Information Security Office remains ongoing.