Ransomware Attack Disrupts Courts and Municipal Services in Dallas
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Dallas city officials have confirmed that a ransomware attack has disrupted several services, including courts, police websites, online payments, and the city's 311 app. A threat was posted on a website related to the Royal Ransomware Group threatening to release data the group claims to have accessed from the City of Dallas
The incident, has led to a two-day closure of the courts, and fewer than 200 city devices were affected. The city's Department of Information and Technology Services (ITS) is actively working to identify the source of the outage and isolate impacted devices. Collaborating with vendors, the team is taking measures to prevent further malware spread, eliminate it from affected servers, and restore services.
The Police Department's homepage remains offline, but fire and police services, including 911 calls, are unaffected. The Dallas City Hall website is partially down, and residents may experience delays in making online payments. The incident follows previous cybersecurity and IT issues in Dallas, including a network outage in April that affected various city departments and a ransomware attack in 2022 that impacted the Dallas Central Appraisal District website for over two weeks.
Update - on 21st of July the City Manager sent an emailto city employees clarifying that at least information stored by the city’s human resources department was exposed and that officials would “be making the appropriate notifications in accordance with our obligations.”
On 3rd August city officials reported that the suspected hackers may have accessed and downloaded sensitive information, including full name, home address, social security number and date of birth as well as “insurance information, clinical information, claims information, diagnosis and other identifiers.
“While the investigation is ongoing, it has determined that an unauthorized third party accessed certain servers and downloaded some data between April 7, 2023, and May 4, 2023,”
On 8th of August it was revealed that computer hackers gained unauthorized access to the personal data of at least 26,212 Texans, far more than the original estimate of 13,400.
Тhe city has begun sending notices to those potentially involved and will provide involved individuals with two years of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection services.
