City’s Chief Information Officer Bill Zielinski describes that the threat actors gained access to 230 City servers, along with around 1,000 computers and more than 1,100 workstations. Following the attack, the City disabled 100 of its servers.
According to Zielinski, “As part of the remediation and restoration activity, every server, workstation and other host device was thoroughly reviewed for potential impact.”
While the City employees were supposed to issue an ‘After Action Report,’ to the Dallas City Council in regards to the ransomware attack on Wednesday, the affair was postponed when the council members spent the entire evening debating amendments to the next FY23-24 budget.
Adding to this, the council had scheduled time as 9 a.m., but the Council members did not mark their presence till 8 p.m.
Later, coming back to the original topic of discussion, the presentation displayed before the council noted that the hacker group ‘Royal Ransomware,’ was behind the attacks and was responsible for gaining illicit access to 1.169 terabytes of City data between April 7 and May 3 this year.
Dallas officials further noted that the reason behind the dysfunctional City services (that stayed for months) was in fact due to the said ransomware attack. For instance, the City was unable to provide up-to-date crime statistics until the end of July 2023. Officials currently assert that 99.9% of City operations are back online.
The Dallas Express has previously reported that hackers are suspected of stealing the personal data of over 26,000 people, including minors. However, the claims were denied by the City which claimed that no such information has been compromised. The City apparently stated, “no indication that data from residents, vendors, or employees has been leaked.”
However, in regards to the City’s response to the attacks, City Manager T.C. Broadnax said that the City did a “great job.” According to him, the City’s overall response was successful, but the messaging was poor.
“Could we do better? I think, from a communication standpoint, at least, what people believe we should be communicating?[…]I would say, yeah, we can always do better,” he said.
