By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — Federal court officials said Thursday that the judicial branch is taking steps to improve online security – including for sensitive case documents – after “escalated cyberattacks” aimed at its case management system.

“The federal Judiciary is taking additional steps to strengthen protections for sensitive case documents in response to recent escalated cyberattacks of a sophisticated and persistent nature on its case management system,” court officials said in a statement.

The judiciary is “further enhancing security of the system and to block future attacks.”

The statement from the judiciary’s administrative arm came a day after a report in Politico detailed a breach of its case management system, which attorneys use to file documents and the public uses to access them. The extent of the hack and who was behind it was not clear and officials declined to answer follow up questions.

Most of the information in the federal case management system is public but criminal dockets, in particular, often include sealed material, including some indictments and search warrants. Companies often are often allowed to shield from view proprietary information that works its way into federal courts in the course of litigation.

The judiciary statement did not say if such sensitive information had been accessed, but it devoted considerable attention to efforts to further protect those documents.

“These sensitive documents can be targets of interest to a range of threat actors,” the statement read. “To better protect them, courts have been implementing more rigorous procedures to restrict access to sensitive documents under carefully controlled and monitored circumstances.”

US court officials have warned about vulnerabilities in the unwieldy case management system for years, and those systems have been breached in the past. Earlier this summer, US Circuit Judge Michael Scudder told lawmakers that the systems were “outdated, unsustainable due to cyber risks, and require replacement.”

“We continue to face unrelenting security threats of extraordinary gravity,” Scudder told a House subcommittee. “We expect the risks and potential damages from these attacks will keep intensifying into the indefinite future.”

Scudder, who chairs a committee within the court system reviewing technology, did not respond to a request for comment from CNN.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who serves as the chief administrative officer for the federal courts, has also publicly warned of the vulnerably of the online systems.

“In other cases,” Roberts wrote in a report last year, “hackers steal information – often confidential and highly sensitive – for nefarious purposes, sometimes for private benefit and other times for the use of state actors themselves.”

The judiciary’s case management and electronic case filing system, known as CM/ECF, is used by attorneys, judges and court staff to catalogue and access court documents as well as to post court orders and opinions. A related system, PACER, is used by the public and other entities outside the judiciary to access those records.

But the system, which is actually a patchwork of different systems controlled by different courts, has long been criticized as out of date. Gabe Roth, executive director of the watchdog group Fix the Court, predicted on social media that without an update “this is going to happen again.”

The statement from the federal judiciary on Thursday did not detail what specific steps court officials have taken to shore up their systems.

“As other federal government and private entities likewise continue to experience, cyber risks continue to evolve as threat actors grow more sophisticated and change and adapt their tactics, and safeguarding legacy systems poses a particularly difficult challenge,” the statement read.

“In tackling cybersecurity threats, the judiciary embraces its security obligations and remains committed to leveraging all available resources to include collaboration with law enforcement, national security and cybersecurity organizations, and other information sharing entities.”

CNN’s Devan Cole and Holmes Lybrand contributed to this report.

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