The City of Dallas, Texas, USA has confirmed that a ransomware attack has brought down critical services, including some 911 call systems.
“On Wednesday morning, the city’s security monitoring tools notified the Security Operations Center (SOC) that a ransomware attack may have been launched in the environment,” the city wrote in a press release. “The city then confirmed that a number of its servers were infected with ransomware, affecting several functional areas, including the Dallas Police Department website.”
As of this writing, the Dallas Police Department website remains unavailable.
“City teams, along with their vendors, are actively working to isolate the ransomware to prevent its spread, remove the ransomware from infected servers, and restore currently affected services.” added the announcement. “The mayor and city council have been notified of the incident in accordance with the city’s Incident Response Plan (IRP).”
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Commenting on the news, Julia O’Toole, CEO of MyCena Security Solutions, said the fact that the attacks are affecting critical services such as police, emergency services and court proceedings poses serious risks to people. said it could bring about
“Ransomware is arguably the biggest cybersecurity threat today, with devastating attacks on organizations every week. But most ransomware attacks can be avoided if organizations regain control of network access.” ‘ she added.
Stephen Gates, Horizon3.ai’s principal security expert, agrees with O’Toole’s point, saying that the most successful ransomware attacks are largely due to hidden vulnerabilities that have been lurking inside networks for some time. I added that it was due to gender.
“It’s imperative to stay ahead of the game and find vulnerabilities yourself by attacking internal networks in the same way attackers do,” Gates explained. “This is not his one-time proposition, because if you don’t know where your vulnerabilities lie, you’ll never be able to manage risk every day.”
The attack on the city of Dallas comes just days after pediatric mental health provider Brightline warned its patients that their data had been compromised in a breach related to a vulnerability in their Fortra GoAnywhere MFT secure file sharing platform.
