City of Dallas dealing with ransomware attack against network
The City of Dallas said it is working to assess the complete impact of the ransomware attack, but that the impact to delivering city services to residents is limited.
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The City of Dallas announced Wednesday afternoon that they discovered a number servers were compromised with ransomware. The city said that its security monitoring tools alerted the Security Operations Center to the ransomware attacks. It was confirmed later that several servers had been compromised and were affecting areas like the Dallas Police Department's website.
Officials said that the city is working actively to prevent ransomware from spreading and to isolate it, as well as to remove it and restore service from servers infected. The city has said that the impact on citizens' delivery of services is minimal at this time, but officials continue to work to determine the full impact. The city has advised that anyone experiencing problems with a city service should contact 311, or 911 in an emergency. Dallas police confirmed that 911 calls were not affected, and officers continue to be dispatched. A previous outage in the city on April 19 caused a City Council meeting to be cancelled and rescheduled. This outage affected many city departments including 311 as well as water utilities. Dallas Police had their own problems last year, when they lost data and more than 8,000,000 records were deleted.