Reports from the City of Dallas reveal a loss of 15 TB of police evidence archives that are believed to date back before July of 2020. Along with the disappearance of the 8 Terabytes of data that occurred earlier this month, further files pertaining to both police and city secretary archives have now gone missing.
The City of Dallas released a formal disclosure on Monday, stating “The City continues to assess the impact of the compromise on its operations, whether data recovery specialists can recover data from the physical devices on which it had been stored or other systems, and whether any additional systems citywide have been affected.”
Concerns about the loss of crucial files detailing violent crime were settled by the Dallas Chief of Police, Eddie Garcia. He claims that no evidence having to do with violent crime was lost in the vanishing of computer data. Conversely, it is difficult to assess what exactly was deleted from the systems, but the office says it must complete an investigation before they can assure other major cases hadn’t been lost. John Crezot, the Dallas County District Attorney, said that 14 TB of data was successfully recovered including the incident earlier this month.
The loss of data seemed to come from a failed data migration, in which files from one system are transferred, extracted, or reformatted. Data migrations are usually permanent. As a consequence, there is discussion of the legal repercussions surrounding cases that were lost. Legal representatives said it could be used as an argument in court cases or as a reason to dispose of cases altogether.
The employee in control of the file transfer was terminated from the IT department after an email sent from Elizabeth Reich, the Dallas Chief Financial Advisor.
