Review: Minnesota Opera accentuates the satire in its ‘Così fan tutte.’

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Dating nightmares make for cynical comedy in Minnesota Opera’s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Così fan tutte.” Under Doug Scholz-Carlson’s direction, the ending is put in the hands of the audience, who vote on how the ridiculous plot resolves.

“Così fan tutte” was Mozart’s third collaboration with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, after “The Marriage of Figaro,” and “Don Giovanni.” Some themes from those earlier works reappear in the new collaboration — questions of infidelity and amorality, for example. In “Così fan tutte,” Da Ponte satirizes notions of romance and leans into the trope that women are inherently fickle.

Scholz-Carlson’s staging pushes against the deep misogyny of Da Ponte’s libretto by accentuating the buffoonery of the two male romantic leads.

Ángel Vargas as Ferrando and David Wolfe as Guglielmo play their roles as complete doofuses. From the first scene where they play video games while drinking Busch Light with their friend Don Alfonso (John Mburu), the two young men act like dude bros with their sporty look and lack of world wisdom.

It’s a wonder Fiordiligi (Kylie Kreucher) and Dorabella (Kara Morgana) ever found these nincompoops marriageable in the first place.

The men are easily persuaded by Don Alfonso, who believes all women are cheaters, to stage an elaborate ruse to trick their partners. Each disguises himself in beards and less preppy attire (the women wonder if they are hippies or lumberjacks), and woo each other’s opposite partner.

Their machinations carry a flaw: In tricking their fiancées to find out if they are trustworthy, they prove themselves untrustworthy. That ironic twist fits into a broader satirization of traditional norms and morals, implying a rather libertine view that faithfulness is impossible, at least as far as women are concerned.

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Of the four leads, Vargas and Kreucher get the most solo moments. In “Rivolgete a lui lo sguardo,” Vargas demonstrates vulnerability, while Kreucher’s technical ability shines in the challenging, octave-jumping aria “Come scoglio,” when Fiordiligi anguishes over her temptation to flirt with Ferrando.

They also make two parts of a trio that also features Don Alfonso, in one of the opera’s highlights.

As the sassy employee at Fiordiligi and Dorabella’s firm, Despina gets two arias as well which she uses to encourage her employers to flirt outside their primary relationships. Lindsay Ohse  steals more than a few scenes not only with her singing, but her comic ability as well, including disguising herself as a doctor and a notary along the way.

When singing together, Kreucher and Morgana’s voices blend wonderfully, capturing Mozart’s delightful harmonies with lightness. There are also a number of excellent quartets and sextets throughout, where the characters bring Mozart’s complex melodies and vocal structures to life.

The design team has created a sleek, mod look. Paul Whitaker’s settings feature huge picture windows and minimalist furniture, while Amber Brown’s costume design recalls an early 1960s aesthetic in its contemporary looks. Wig, hair and make-up designer Emma Gustafson, meanwhile takes on the task of making our two male heroes terrible disguises just believable enough to fool their partners.

This production of “Così fan tutte” allows Mozart’s score to sparkle, even as the story’s games of love and deceit paint a rather bleak picture of love in the world today.

 

Who: The Minnesota Opera

What: Così fan tutte

When: 7:30 p.m. Thu., Nov. 6, Sat., Nov 8, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov 9,

Where: The Ordway, 345 Washington St. Saint Paul

Tickets: $31-$273 at mnopera.org.

Accessibility: Elevators access all floors of Concert Hall, accessibility seating for all mobility devices (request when buying tickets); service animals welcome (inform ticket representative); listening units and large print available upon request. One single occupancy, accessible restroom in the Music Theater lobby. Ordway.org/visit/accessibility.

Capsule: Minnesota Opera accentuates the satire in its “Così fan tutte.”

Skywatch: Long starry nights are back

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(Mike Lynch)

The best news for stargazers in November is that nights are much longer and you can start your stargazing well before 7 p.m. It is cooler, of course, but once you’re out there with something warm in a thermos cup, you’re more than good to go.

This Wednesday we have a full moon. It’s considered a “supermoon” because it’s a little closer to Earth than average. Our lunar companion makes it tough for stargazers to see fainter stars and constellations. The second and third weeks of November will be better for evening stargazing with the moon pretty much out of the sky.

One of the major stories this November is the interstellar comet, 3I Atlas, an extremely rare comet from another star system. It was discovered this past July, and this month it’s finally possible to see it, though not with your naked eye. Chances are you’ll need a fairly powerful telescope or a way to photograph it using a conventional astrophotography setup, or maybe one of those much less expensive all-in-one smart telescopes like SeeStar or Dwarf. Atlas 3I may surprise us, though, and be brighter than expected. Comet 3I Atlas will be on the rise in predawn skies. Early in the month it rises in the eastern skies just before morning twilight kicks in but as November continues it’ll rise earlier and earlier. By the end of the month it’ll be better than halfway from the horizon to the zenith in the southeastern skies. The best way to find it is to use a stargazing app. Most of them, at least at the basic level, are free. I recommend either Sky Guide or Celestron Sky Portal.

Believe it or not, a few summer constellations are still available in the western sky in the early evening. Cygnus the Swan, Lyra the Harp, Aquila the Eagle, Delphinus the Dolphin, and a few others continue their gradual westward migration, making their slow exit from the evening stargazing stage.

In the high southern sky is one of the prime autumn constellations, Pegasus the Winged Horse, with Andromeda the Princess tagging along. Use your Sky Guide App to locate the Andromeda Galaxy, a great telescope target in the constellation Andromeda. If it’s dark enough where you’re viewing from, it’s possible to see with the naked eye, well over 2 million light-years away!

Turn around and face north and you’ll see an old friend, the Big Dipper, very low in the sky, and partially below the horizon in some locations. The Little Dipper, otherwise known as Ursa Minor, is hanging by its handle higher in the northern sky. Cassiopeia the Queen, the constellation that looks like a giant sideways W, is proudly showing off her stuff in the high northeast. The W outlines the throne of Queen Cassiopeia, with her majesty tied up in it. Just below Cassiopeia in the constellation Perseus, the Hero is an absolute must-see. It’s the Perseus Double Cluster. This one you can see for sure in the dark countryside. Just use a small telescope or binoculars. It’ll blow your mind! Through your field of view you’ll see two clusters of stars huddled close together. Astronomically, they’re young families of stars that all formed together, and they’re over 7,000 light-years away!

As November progresses you can’t help but notice a barrage of bright stars rising in the eastern heavens. These are many of the magnificent constellations of winter! My nickname for this part of the heavens is “Orion and his Gang.” It’s also called “The Winter Football, among other names. The majestic constellation Orion the Hunter is the centerpiece. Part of that gang includes the Pleiades, the best star cluster in the sky, resembling a miniature Big Dipper. By the way, the Pleiades are a little over 400 light-years away. If you magically “pull in” the aforementioned Perseus Double Cluster to the distance of the Pleiades, the Perseus Double Cluster would take up about a quarter of the sky!

Saturn is one of two planets you can see easily with the naked eye in the early evening. As evening twilight fades, it’s already well above the southeast horizon. Aim even a small telescope at Saturn, and you’ll see its ring system, but not as well as you usually can. The angle of the very thin ring system is still nearly on edge from our view on Earth, but month by month, that angle is opening up as Saturn and Earth travel along their individual orbits around the sun. For sure, you can, at least, since some of Saturn’s many moons, including Titan, its largest moon that’s as big as the planet Mercury.

If you’re a night owl stargazer, Jupiter will dazzle you, emerging from the east-southeast horizon around 11 p.m. the first week of November, but thanks to the Earth’s progression around the sun and the end of daylight-saving time, the big guy of the solar system rises a little after 8 p.m. You can’t miss it! Jupiter will be the brightest star-like object in the evening sky this coming winter. With even a small telescope or decent binoculars, you can also catch the nightly show put on by Jupiter’s four moons.

Put on that warm jacket and enjoy the fabulous November night skies!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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‘It is a crisis’: Mayors share how grappling with housing has shaped their jobs

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By Robbie Sequeira, Stateline.org

In U.S. cities big and small, mayors are finding their tenures shaped by housing shortages, and efforts to build more homes, so that people of any income can afford a place to live.

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In a series of conversations, mayors of big cities such as Atlanta and Seattle, as well as of midsize Midwest cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Madison, Wisconsin, told Stateline that housing is the No. 1 priority for mayors to tackle.

“Housing is by far one of the most important issues facing every mayor in America. It impacts everything from safety to the workforce to transit,” said Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther, who also is the immediate past president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Mayors are on the front lines of our nation’s housing crisis. And it is a crisis.”

More than half of mayors in a recent bipartisan survey expect affordability in their cities to decline over the next year, and nearly all say their residents are dissatisfied with current housing costs. The survey was released in June by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, along with the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Capital One Insights Center.

And while a large share of big-city mayors are Democratic, members of both parties are seeking some nonpartisan solutions. Republican Mark Shepherd of Clearfield, Utah, and Democrat Rex Richardson of Long Beach, California, are pressing Congress to expand rental assistance and affordable housing programs, while also partnering with business leaders to boost supply. The two mayors help lead a coalition called Mayors and CEOs for U.S. Housing Investment.

Housing is a pivotal issue in next month’s mayoral races in Minneapolis, New York City and Seattle.

But even as mayors set ambitious targets, they’re often working within narrow lanes of authority. While city halls can zone land, streamline permits and invest local dollars, they can’t override state preemption laws or control climbing construction costs and interest rates. In many municipalities, the success and reach of a mayor’s housing vision hinges as much on what state lawmakers allow as on what local voters demand.

At least 30 states have barred cities from enacting rent control. Other factors not related to the push-and-pull of home rule between state and local governments cap how much mayors can influence housing within their borders.

“You have to analyze what you can control and what you can’t,” Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said. “Interest rates, tariffs, the cost of materials — those are conditions we can’t fix. What we can do is plan smarter, permit faster and fund what’s within our reach.”

A fast-growing metro area

Ginther, the Columbus mayor, could talk about housing all day. He told Stateline he can’t imagine a mayor in the country who doesn’t have housing consistently on their minds.

As Columbus grapples with record growth and rising housing costs, Ginther says the city’s biggest challenge isn’t political will, it’s scale. Columbus needs 200,000 more housing units in the next 10 years to help bring down the cost of rents and ownership, he said.

Ginther, who is serving his second term, recently proposed creating a Division of Housing Stability. He said that mayors need to use the talent in their offices and agencies to tackle different aspects of the housing crisis, from helping residents find an affordable home to enabling them to keep it.

He’s also said that city voters’ willingness to approve big-dollar bond issues is a “buy-in” that many cities would be fortunate to have.

Since 2019, the city has used $250 million in bonds to build about 4,000 rental units. Voters are being asked to support another $500 million housing bond this November, along with other bonds for parks, police and fire, and road paving. More than half the city’s residents are renters.

Ginther said it’s a part of a $1.9 billion infrastructure package — combining city, county, state, federal and private resources — to reach the 200,000-unit goal.

“It’s ambitious, but if we commit to housing the way we’ve committed to jobs and workforce development, we’ll get it done.”

According to census data, the Columbus metropolitan area ranks among the fastest-growing U.S. metros. Meanwhile, the Ohio Housing Finance Agency reports that from 2016 to 2021, the state saw a 38% decline in vacant units available for sale or rent, and during the same period saw a 13% increase in units classified for seasonal, recreational or occasional use, such as short-term rentals.

“The city has created jobs and we have one of the fastest-growing economies in the Midwest, but we didn’t build enough housing in previous years to keep up with that. And we have been only doing it a certain way,” said Ginther.

He added that the scale of housing issues is bigger than any one jurisdiction.

“We need regional and state partners to step up, too,” Ginther said. “I’ve said I’ll do half the [Franklin County] region’s housing needs … but I need my suburban and exurban neighbors to do their part.”

The squeeze in small cities

In northern Utah’s Davis County, Clearfield is proudly the home of Hill Air Force Base. Since the 1940s, a large share of military air force personnel have worked and lived nearby.

But Shepherd, the mayor, says his city — with about 32,000 people and once the blue-collar “starter home capital” — has transformed into a market that military families can no longer afford.

“It’s scary,” Shepherd, a Republican who was elected in 2013, told Stateline. “We used to be where people came for their first homes. Now, four airmen are splitting a two-bedroom apartment.”

Despite limited land, Clearfield has permitted or built 4,000 homes in five years, many through denser, vertical development. Shepherd, a longtime real estate agent, is pushing for Utah to expand condominium construction and creative financing tools, including through a new $300 million state loan program.

“Everybody wants ownership,” he said. “If someone wants to buy, we have an obligation to help make that happen.”

But he’s frank about the political headwinds: resistance to density, neighboring cities blocking townhome projects, and a state legislature eager to preempt local control.

A construction worker helps build a mixed-use apartment complex that will hold more than 700 units of housing and 95,000 square feet of commercial space on Jan. 25, 2024, in Los Angeles. (Mario Tama/Getty Images North America/TNS)

“Density is a swear word for elected officials,” Shepherd said. “Some cities just won’t build, and when the carrot doesn’t work, sometimes you have to bring out the stick.”

Shepherd said housing challenges are a constant topic among his peers across the country, especially in communities tied to military installations. As a member of the National League of Cities’ Military Communities Council, he regularly exchanges ideas with other mayors facing similar shortages.

“I haven’t had one mayor of a military city tell me they’re totally fine with housing,” he said. “Everywhere, it’s the same story. … The demand is high, the supply is tight, and servicemembers are getting priced out.”

Pressure from outside city borders

In Atlanta, one of the economic and cultural hubs of the South, Mayor Andre Dickens has seen the city get some good headlines in its efforts to address housing issues.

According to Realtor.com’s August 2025 rental report, the median asking rent in metro Atlanta dropped 13.6% year-over-year, one of the largest declines among the 50 biggest U.S. metros, tied with Las Vegas. Dickens credits the trend to an intentional surge in housing production.

In just under four years, Dickens has reached 60% of his goal to build or preserve 20,000 units of lower-cost housing by 2030, he said. Since taking office, he said that 12,000 units are already built or underway, aided by an Affordable Housing Strike Force that meets monthly to fast-track permits and secure funding for those projects.

“Atlanta was seen as affordable compared to New York or California, but our incomes weren’t keeping up,” Dickens told Stateline. His approach, in addition to approving a boost in city workers’ pay last year, was to help create more housing. “We made it our mission to build for low- and moderate-income families and to stop people from being rent-burdened.”

Among the projects Dickens touted to Stateline was the Atlanta Beltline, an urban redevelopment along 22 miles of rail line that delivered 569 affordable housing units last year — almost double its annual goal. The aim is 5,600 units in the area by 2030. Funding often combines public and private sources, and Dickens said that as the mayor, it’s his responsibility to bring these groups to the table.

He also noted that the city is dealing with an influx of residents both from Atlanta’s suburbs and from cities that have their own housing challenges, such as Chicago, New Orleans and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

“Some suburban or rural counties don’t invest in homelessness or affordability, so those residents eventually land in cities,” said Dickens, who also is a co-chair of the National Housing Crisis Task Force, a coalition of elected officials.

“We can’t push them away,” he said. “We just have to deal with it, because cities are where people come for hope and help. That’s why mayors must lead with compassion and strategy.”

Kitchen-table terms

In Wisconsin, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway told Stateline that the capital city’s housing challenge is simple but daunting:

“We were not building enough housing to keep up with our population growth,” said Rhodes-Conway, who was elected in 2019. “We built ourselves into a problem.”

Madison is Wisconsin’s fastest-growing city, but housing supply lagged far behind. When Rhodes-Conway took office in 2019, the city’s rental vacancy rate hovered around 1-2%, she said, far below the healthy 5-6% range.

Since then, Rhodes-Conway and the City Council have opened new funding channels and loosened zoning rules to speed construction. The city’s Affordable Housing Fund, once focused solely on federally funded Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects, now includes money for co-ops, community land trusts and homeownership efforts, she said.

“It was important to invite folks to think creatively about how we create affordability,” she said.

Her administration also works to preserve existing affordable stock through the Efficiency Navigator program, which upgrades older apartments for energy efficiency in exchange for rent-stability commitments. On the regulatory side, Madison has updated its zoning code to clear “pain points” such as density limits and onerous approval processes that once stalled projects, she said.

The results are tangible, as the city has completed more than 17,000 new homes since 2015, with another 5,000 under construction. Under a regional plan, Madison aims to add 15,000 more between 2025 and 2030, aligning with Dane County’s housing goals.

Rhodes-Conway sees the role of a housing-focused mayor to be both a policymaker and a translator.

Mayors need to discuss housing not in zoning jargon, she said, but in kitchen-table terms: stories about parents who can’t afford to buy where they grew up, the seniors priced out of longtime homes, or workers enduring farther commutes for a reasonable, cost-efficient living situation.

“Talking about NIMBYs and AMIs [area median incomes] doesn’t help,” she said. “Talking about your neighbor or your kid who can’t find an apartment, that’s real life.”

Personal experience

Harrell, the Seattle mayor, says he’s trying to turn one of America’s priciest markets into a working model of coordinated, city-level housing governance. When Harrell took office in 2022, he declared himself a “housing mayor.” Seattle’s population growth and its million-dollar home prices demanded more than a single department could manage, he said.

“I realized a city as large as Seattle had a fragmented housing policy,” Harrell said. “So we created a housing subcabinet — every department that touches housing now rows in the same direction.”

And when the state government does make changes to housing or zoning laws, that’s when mayors need to strike, he said.

In 2023, for example, Washington state allowed for the building of duplexes, triplexes and other forms of “middle housing” on land formerly zoned only for single-family homes. Seattle immediately adopted the change.

Harrell shepherded a $970 million property tax levy approved by voters in 2023 to help pay for affordable housing. The city’s new 20-year housing plan increases zoning capacity to allow for 330,000 new housing units, roughly double the target of the city’s previous plan. His administration has also accelerated permitting, which he said has “sped up some projects by one to two years.”

For Harrell, who hopes to win a second term in November, changing affordability in the city harks back to his parents’ first home in Seattle.

“The first house my mom and dad bought here in Seattle is still there,” Harrell said. “Same condition, same footprint. … It hasn’t had an addition. They bought it for $6,000 and sold it for $30,000. That same modest house today is worth over a million dollars.”

He then drew a parallel to his own experience buying a starter home in the 1980s.

“The first house I bought, I was making less than $40,000 a year, and I bought it for $87,000 with my college roommate, at about twice our income,” he said. “That house, too, is worth about a million now. I should’ve held onto it.”

These two homes capture the scale of the affordability crisis, he said.

“That’s the context we’re operating in,” he said. “And if I’m asking people who are already struggling with rent or mortgages to pay more into affordable housing through a levy, I have to be the evangelist. I have to show that we’re putting our own skin in the game.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

‘Catastrophic’ hack underscores public defender security gaps

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By Jimmy Jenkins, Jamie Tarabay, Bloomberg News

Recent cyberattacks on public defenders’ offices in multiple Western U.S. states have spotlighted the technological vulnerabilities of an often overlooked but critical part of the U.S. judicial system.

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Public defenders, who represent clients unable to pay for their own lawyers in cases as serious as murder, are a staple of American justice. Many of the offices, which are scattered across the country, house decades of digital client records at any given moment.

Cyberattacks on public defender offices in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado have impacted thousands of case files, in some cases sabotaging those offices’ ability to defend their clients in a timely manner.

There’s no indication the separate episodes were part of a coordinated effort by attackers, but security experts say they underscore the appeal of cash-strapped organizations sitting on troves of data.

“Hackers now hit organizations that are unlikely to pay, like public defenders, because the disruption alone creates pressure,” said Jon DiMaggio, chief security strategist at Virginia-based Analyst1. “Going after victims with little to offer shows just how indiscriminate and damaging these attacks have become.”

The Arizona Federal Public Defender’s Office is still reeling from a major hack seven months ago that hijacked its systems and wiped out access to decades’ worth of data.

Officials said the hackers stole and encrypted 60 years’ worth of client records and other internal documents used to defend people accused of crimes ranging from financial fraud to murder.

The hack sent the office’s attorneys rushing to reconstruct case materials from other sources and prompted requests for delays in a death-penalty case inside the state and another in neighboring Utah.

‘Catastrophic’ Attack

The hack in Arizona was discovered in March and outlined in a court filing in early April. It led to a request for an extension in a capital case involving a man facing execution in Utah. The filing cited the cyberattack and said the office had no access to any of its files and needed more time to prepare a briefing.

Just a few days earlier, nearly 200 employees of the Arizona Federal Public Defender’s Office had woken up to an urgent text message from their boss, Jon Sands, instructing them to immediately power off their computers and close them, according to people familiar with the matter. They were told the computer network had been encrypted by hackers and all of their files were being held for ransom in cryptocurrency, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

After the initial alert, all employees were told to personally deliver or ship their electronic devices to the Phoenix office for security reviews and resets. A few weeks later, the federal court system offered employees in the Arizona office 12 months of credit monitoring, according to a letter sent to current and former staff that was viewed by Bloomberg.

The office called in cybersecurity experts, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate and try to recoup the files, according to the letter.

In another case involving a death row inmate, Sands laid out more details.

“While the network has been restored, it is a blank slate,” Sands wrote in June. He said in the case of the death row clients, the public defenders office “has lost decades worth of digital case files and work product that must now be reconstructed in every case. The vast majority of our clients’ life history records and our work product have been lost.” In a subsequent filing, Sands described the attack as “catastrophic.”

‘Data Rubble’

Hackers deployed malware that corrupted the entire system, including the backup, turning key case files into “data rubble,” the office’s administrative officer William Sweet said in an email to Bloomberg.

The Arizona office declined to share details about the ransom demand or whether the state paid an extortion fee. No group has publicly claimed responsibility. Cyber researchers and analysts told Bloomberg they haven’t seen evidence the data was published online.

While the network has been restored, the files remain encrypted and out of reach. The office has requested bids for a provider of data backup services.

“We are still in the process of assessing the breach and restoring data to the best of our ability to support the representation of our clients,” Sands said in an email to Bloomberg. “We have continued to represent them effectively and zealously.”

The Justice Department declined to comment. The FBI said it couldn’t respond during the federal government shutdown. A spokesperson with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts acknowledged the attack and said the judiciary worked with cybersecurity experts and federal agencies to investigate the incident and mitigate any potential risks.

New Mexico

The Arizona breach follows a cyber incident in the New Mexico state-level public defender’s office. The office said it’d been the “target of a significant cybersecurity breach, compromising the office’s ability to communicate with clients and criminal court partners and to access critical internal records,” in a July, 2024 statement.

Chief Public Defender Ben Baur said in a statement to Bloomberg that the office continues to work to improve security.

“As public defenders, we work hard to help our clients and communities, with already strained resources,” Baur said. “Dealing with a cyber security incident made our work even more difficult.” His office declined to share whether there was a ransom demand or whether the state paid an extortion fee.

Security strategist DiMaggio pinned the incident on a ransomware group from Eastern Europe known as Rhysida. He said hackers asked for bids, starting at 10 Bitcoin, which at the time would have been worth just over $650,000.

At least 1.5 terabytes of data from the breach have been dumped online, including death certificates, driver’s license suspension notices, and the names of inmates held in a county detention center, DiMaggio said.

Separately, in February of 2024, “malware encryption” eliminated network access for the Colorado Office of the State Public Defender, according to a court notice. The office didn’t respond to requests for comment on the attack, whether there was a ransom demand or whether they paid a fee.

Federal Courts

Meanwhile, Russian state-sponsored hackers were found lurking in the records systems of U.S. courts, which contain federal court records, including district, appellate and bankruptcy courts, Bloomberg News has reported. Hackers had infiltrated the system years ago, gaining access to sensitive documents that were sealed from public view.

It’s unclear exactly when the hackers first penetrated the system and when the courts became aware of the breach. The judiciary said in a statement in August that it was enhancing security for sensitive case documents in response to recent escalated cyberattacks and to block future attacks.

Alexander Leslie, a senior adviser at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, said that public-sector organizations like courts “face significant challenges” in girding against cyber attacks.

“Implementing comprehensive backup and recovery systems takes time and sustained investment,” he said.

—With assistance from Andrew Martin.

©2025 Bloomberg News. Visit at bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.