A possible ransomware attack affected several City of Dallas servers on Wednesday morning, according to a City statement received by The Dallas Express.
The likely attack was detected by the City’s Security Operations Center, which notified Mayor Eric Johnson and the City Council of the incident.
“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 statement explained. “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.”
As of 3:40 p.m., The Dallas Express could not access the websites for either Dallas PD or the City of Dallas, only being met by a notification that reads, “The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.”
The City’s statement to The Dallas Express claimed that “the impact [of the ransomware attack] on the delivery of City services to its residents is limited.”
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, the Dallas Central Appraisal District (DCAD) was hit with a ransomware attack back in November of last year. Its website only became fully functional again in February.
DCAD eventually paid $170,000 in cryptocurrency to the ransomware group and further allocated nearly $500,000 in various efforts to improve cyber security.
It is unclear if this latest alleged ransomware attack will result in more taxpayer-funded payments being made by local government entities.