Listen to this articleInformation from some of Dallas’ 13,400 employees may have been compromised during a cyber attack against the city earlier this year.
August 7, 2023
The city determined that an unauthorized third party accessed certain servers and downloaded some information between April 7 and May 4.
Lauren Drewes Daniels
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The city is encouraging people to be vigilant in reviewing their financial statements and credit reports on a regular basis to identify fraudulent or irregular activity. Dallas has also set up a response center to enable those who have been affected to ask questions and receive assistance on credit monitoring services.
This comes just weeks after City Manager T.C. Broadnax sent an email to Dallas employees saying the hackers had gained access to their data.
“Our investigation remains ongoing, but at this time we’ve learned that some information maintained by the city of Dallas, including some benefits-related information maintained by the city’s human resources department, was accessed by the unauthorized third party responsible for this ransomware incident,” Broadnax said in the email which was obtained by the Observer. “We will be making the appropriate notifications in accordance with our obligations.”
Broadnax sent another email to city employees on Thursday letting them know of the resources available for affected individuals. “The professionals responding to this toll-free call center are familiar with this incident and can provide more information on what individuals can do to protect against misuse of their information,” he said in the email. “We continue to be incredibly grateful for your patience. Investigations like these take time, and we are dedicated to getting you all answers as soon as we can without compromising the integrity of our data review.”
The group behind the attack, called Royal, was responsible for a separate attack on the Dallas Central Appraisal District in November that took down its website for weeks.
A short time later, the attackers released an update on their blog: “So, we are going to indicate that the data will be leaked soon. We will share here in our blog tons of personal information of employees (phones, addresses, credit cards, [Social Security Numbers], passports), detailed court cases, prisons, medical information, clients’ information and thousands of thousands of governmental documents.”
After the latest attack against Dallas, several city services were disrupted, such as 311 services requests. Courts also closed down as a result of the attack, and Dallas Water Utilities couldn’t process payments. Dallas was also having trouble processing applications or payments for zoning, public works, permitting or development services. The disruptions in the permitting process left a backlog of permits waiting to be approved. At one point, there were some 870 permits awaiting approval due to the effects of the ransomware attack. The city has since been able to process all of the permits that were delayed.
Impacts to police and fire operations forced some automated tasks to be done manually, but those have largely been resolved. Catherine Cuellar, a spokesperson for the city, said in an emailed statement that the city’s network has been restored more than 97%, and it has made public-facing services a priority. Cuellar said the most recent departments to reopen after upgrades were the municipal court in May, the Dallas Public Library catalogue in June, and the public library computers in July.
In late June, the city approved nearly $4 million to be spent with a Houston-based company called Netsync Network Solutions to install and maintain a threat and anomaly detection system to protect against cyber threats, including ransomware attacks.
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