Abilene, Texas local government systems taken offline after cyberattack

The city government of Abilene, Texas has been forced to shut down multiple systems following a cyberattack detected on Friday 19th of April 2025. Officials became aware of the incident after receiving reports of unresponsive servers within the city's internal network, prompting IT staff to disconnect affected systems.

The city has engaged cybersecurity experts to investigate the incident and assess impact. City officials issued a statement confirming that "certain systems have been taken offline. However, emergency services are still up and running with the continued ability to timely assist, and no unidentified financial activity has been detected."

The nature of the attack, exposed data types and number of affected individuals is not disclosed. 

The outage has impacted payment processing of city services. Card payment systems at government offices are currently non-operational, requiring residents to use cash or checks for in-person transactions. The city has committed to not disconnect utilities due to overdue accounts during the recovery period.

Update - as of 1st of June, the city of Abilene reports that the attack was caused by a ransomware operation conducted by the Russian-linked group Qilin. Troy Swanson, Abilene's Director of Information Technology, said the attackers accessed administrative credentials and attempted to disable antivirus protections before being cut off. "The City suffered a ransomware attack," Swanson said. "They encrypted data and deleted data off our servers."

The Qilin gang has claimed responsibility for the attack and told the City it had stolen 477 gigabytes of data. The compromised data includes:

• Tax returns
• Government documents
• Employee information
• Sensitive city data (exact contents under investigation)

The number of affected individuals has not been disclosed by the city.