Russian attackers reportedly spent months rummaging through the US federal court's creaky case-management system, while Norway reckons the same Kremlin-friendly miscreants took control of a dam's controls – a transatlantic double-act in legal files and floodgates.

The attack on Washington's systems, confirmed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts on August 5, saw attackers break into the US court system's digital filing cabinet where they began rifling through the paperwork.

The CM/ECF platform (and its public-facing cousin PACER) is a patchwork of more than 200 locally run instances, many of them built when Windows XP was still considered cutting-edge, and is used by lawyers to file motions, submit evidence, and upload sensitive case material.

The intruders reportedl

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