City Manager T.C. Broadnax claimed the City did a “great job” responding to the alleged ransomware attack on City servers.
Hackers allegedly obtained the personal data of more than 26,000 people in May, including children.
The City had previously insisted that such data had not been compromised, claiming there was “no indication that data from residents, vendors, or employees has been leaked.”
Officials later said that “files potentially containing sensitive information of certain individuals were accessed by the unauthorized third party, including full name, home address, Social Security number, date of birth, insurance information, clinical information, claims information, diagnosis, and other identifiers.”
The seeming lack of transparency on the part of the City has previously raised concern among Dallas residents, with a plurality of respondents in a poll conducted by The Dallas Express indicating they think officials should be more forthcoming.
Broadnax admitted that the City’s messaging on the alleged ransomware attack was poor but maintained his response was successful overall.
“Could we do better? I think, from a communication standpoint, at least, what people believe we should be communicating?” he told The Dallas Morning News. “I would say, yeah, we can always do better.”
“But I think how we’ve approached it, particularly being measured in trying to understand and know all of what it is we were going to be sharing, and the magnitude of it before we shared it to make sure that the information was accurate and helpful, I think we’ve done a great job,” Broadnax said. “I think the impacts could have been much worse, particularly given the size and breadth of our organization.”
He told the DMN that the City’s IT department has been spending more taxpayer money on data-related services over the past few years. In 2018, the department spent $77 million. It will spend $110 million in 2023.
In Broadnax’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year, he suggested raising the figure to $132 million. The proposed budget calls for a total of $4.6 billion in spending.
The City’s servers were allegedly breached on April 7, but the breach was not discovered until May 3.
Broadnax, Deputy City Manager Jon Fortune, and Chief Information Officer Bill Zielinski declined to tell the DMN how the alleged breach occurred, which departments were compromised, or the amount of data obtained by hackers.
“I want to wait until [the report] is finalized to share that information,” said Zielinski. He added that more information about the attack will be shared at a Dallas City Council briefing on Wednesday. The briefing will be covered by The Dallas Express.