City-run websites in Dallas were likely hit by a ransomware attack, a report from NBC 5 says. The cyber threat shut down the 911 dispatch systems in the city and even caused cancellations of some jury trials.
Dallas Battles With Ransomware Attack
Dallas city officials said that a widespread ransomware attack affected a few service websites, including City Hall and Police Department websites.
Officials said on Wednesday, May 3, that the cybersecurity attack downed several websites of City Hall and the Dallas Police Department.
The widespread outage, which the authorities described as a form of "ransomware attack," has caused a temporary downtime to the 911 dispatch system.
It should be noted that the incident did not hit 911 calls but computer-assisted technology only. This dispatch system is what firefighters use in times of emergency.
At that time, the Dallas Police Department website was inaccessible. The officials said that the city quickly got on track to investigate the potential cause of the outage.
In an interview with TechCrunch, DPD spokesperson Melinda Gutierrez said that the outage also forced 911 call takers to jot down the instructions manually so the responding officers could still follow them despite not having dispatch systems.
The city of Dallas said that the ransomware attack only posed "limited impact" to the city services.
As of writing, the team continues to find the possible answers to why the outage happened in the first place. The city is now searching for solutions to mitigate the outage and exterminate the ransomware from attacking the online services.
The Municipal Court announced that the ongoing jury trials during the time of the incident were all canceled since all the PD and City Hall websites were down, per NBC News.
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Who is responsible for the Dallas outage?
TechCrunch saw a copy of the note indicating that the Royal ransomware group is the responsible gang behind the attack.
The note includes the contact form of the victims on its dark website. It also says that if the city does not comply with its ransom demand, the sensitive data will be leaked online.
At this point, the City of Dallas does not have any clue why the gang attacked the Police and City Hall websites. The authorities did not mention if the financial demands were given to the culprits.
For those unfamiliar with this notorious group of cyber criminals, the Royal ransomware gang was first discovered in 2022. The dangerous crew of hackers reportedly attacked organizations in and out of the United States.
The most common ploy that the group does is launching a callback phishing to the victims. Once they send emails to unaware users, they will disable the antivirus tool right after they urge them to call an unknown phone number.
The US alone already suffered from 29 cases of cyberattacks in 2023, as per Brett Callow, a ransomware expert. The hackers often compromised the systems owned by local governments.
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