City of Dallas limping back to normalcy following a crippling ransomware attack

The City of Dallas in the US state of Texas is yet to completely recover from the impact of a cyber attack it suffered last week that crippled several departments, including the courts, fire, and police networks.

Earlier this month, the City of Dallas suffered a significant ransomware attack that impacted numerous IT systems and shut down the website and communications of the Dallas Police Department (DPD). In a statement, the City said that on May 3, its security monitoring tools notified its Security Operations Centre that a ransomware attack had been launched within its environment.

The ransomware infected several servers, affecting numerous functional areas such as the police department’s computer-assisted dispatch system called CAD which directs police to emergencies and other calls. Operators were able to receive emergency calls but had to resort to manual operations and communicate with officers via phones and radios.

The City said on May 6 that it worked “throughout this weekend to ensure progress toward service restoration”. “As of Saturday, May 6, steady, measured progress continues with minimal service disruption. We are confident we have contained the source of the infection and not seen any new spread,” the City said.

In a separate update on May 9, the City confirmed that “911 calls are being entered into the Computer Assisted Dispatch (CAD) system. DPD has been dispatching automatically since Monday and DFR is routing calls for automatic dispatch where available.”

While Dallas Water Utilities (DWU) is still impacted, payment systems have been restored and citizens will get an estimated water bill this month, which will be fixed in the coming months. The City’s Municipal Court has also resumed limited operations and is open to providing general citation information and accepting customer documents in person. However, it is still not accepting any mode of payment.

“There are no court hearings, trials, or jury duty until further notice. All cases scheduled during this outage will be reset. Updated court dates will be mailed to the address the court has on file. Citation payments due while the Municipal Court system is down will be accepted after service is restored,” the City added.

The City added that the City Library is still offline and most public computers are down, which means that customers are required to complete checkouts manually as well.