Wednesday morning, the city of Dallas’ IT department notified their bosses that they had detected a “likely ransomware attack.” This afternoon, City Hall’s website is down—you can’t currently pay your water bill online or watch riveting public meetings—as is the police department’s. The city says it is “actively working to isolate the ransomware to prevent its spread,” and that “the impact on the delivery of City services to its residents is limited.”
Still, if you can’t access a particular service, the city says to call 311. Emergencies can still call 911.
“The City is currently working to assess the complete impact,” read a statement from City Hall.
“The Dallas Police Department is being affected by an outage in the city,” wrote police spokeswoman Kristin Lowman in an email. “Our website is affected, along with our Computer Aided Dispatch. There is no effect to 911 calls at this time, and they continue to be dispatched for service. The outage is not affecting police response.”
In the meantime, maybe someone should call the appraisal district, which was held up by ransomware for months last year. The city’s full statement is below:
Wednesday morning, the City’s security monitoring tools notified our Security Operations Center (SOC) that a likely ransomware attack had been launched within our environment. Subsequently, the City has confirmed that a number of servers have been compromised with ransomware, impacting several functional areas, including the Dallas Police Department Website. The City team, along with its vendors, are actively working to isolate the ransomware to prevent its spread, to remove the ransomware from infected servers, and to restore any services currently impacted. The Mayor and City Council was notified of the incident pursuant to the City’s Incident Response Plan (IRP). The City is currently working to assess the complete impact, but at this time, the impact on the delivery of City services to its residents is limited. Should a resident experience a problem with a particular City service, they should contact 311. For emergencies, they should contact 911.
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