The Dallas Police Association (DPA) and Dallas Fire Fighters Association (DFFA) are demanding that the City of Dallas purchase identity theft protection for their members.
Their demand comes almost three weeks after an alleged ransomware attack purportedly affected a number of City computer systems and left City employees’ sensitive personal information exposed to cybercriminals, who have since allegedly threatened to publish such information online, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
In a letter addressed to Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax, DPA President Mike Mata and DFFA President Jim McDade claimed that the City has been misrepresenting the extent first responder services have been impacted.
“Your office repeatedly stated that our operations were not affected in any way and that was flat out false, but through it all the men and women of the Police and Fire Departments were here to serve and protect the citizens and visitors of Dallas,” wrote Mata and McDade.
The letter went on to blame Broadnax and his office for a possible lapse in cyber security, claiming that “the city manager’s office was warned in the past few years that the systems in place in Dallas were not sufficient and susceptible to attack and still nothing was done to both protect the city and its employees.”
Mata and McDade concluded their letter by arguing that purchasing identity theft protection services for their members is “necessary and the least the city can do to insure [sic] our personal financial information is not compromised.”
They want the service for five years at no cost to their members.
“The transparency through this whole thing has been questionable, at best,” McDade told WFAA. “We’ve been trying to get answers. They keep saying, ‘Well, we don’t think so.’ But nobody can give me a guarantee.”
In the City’s latest update, officials continued to deny that any sensitive information had been acquired by cybercriminals, claiming “there remains no established evidence of a data leak.”
Still, numerous City services in Dallas have been disrupted in recent weeks, purportedly because of the cyberattack. For instance, the Dallas Municipal Court building shut its doors on Monday and is not set to reopen until May 30, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
“During this time, we cannot accept payments in person, online, or by phone. There are also no court hearings, trials, or jury duty. All cases scheduled during the outage will be reset,” said officials in a notice.