The City said that less than 200 of its devices had been impacted and that impacted devices would be “quarantined and blocked” by the IT department.
The City of Dallas in Texas was hit with a ransomware attack on Wednesday, which has impeded multiple government services, according to the city government.
“Wednesday morning, the City’s security monitoring tools notified our Security Operations Center (SOC) that a likely ransomware attack had been launched within our environment,” the city said in a media advisory.
“Subsequently, the City has confirmed that a number of servers have been compromised with ransomware, impacting several functional areas, including the Dallas Police Department Website.”
By 5 p.m. local time, the City of Dallas said in a statement that its information technology department “will continue working around the clock to identify the source of the outage and isolate impacted devices.”
Services to residents have continued “with minimal disruption,” it claimed.
This included the Dallas Police Department and Dallas Fire Rescue, whose services “is unaffected although the home page is offline” for the respective services with 911 and 311 calls being received and dispatched.
The City said Court was closed Wednesday and “will also be closed on Thursday.” All cases will be reset, and notices will be sent by mail, it added.
Meanwhile, Dallas Water Utilities are accepting payments via the city’s automated phone system. The City noted that online payment processing “may be delayed,” but there will be no disconnections to be processed until the ransomware outage is resolved.
As of 12:05 a.m. Thursday local time in Dallas, The Epoch Times could not access the website of the Dallas Police Department, which returned a message of “The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.”
The website of the City of Dallas has a few links up on its page as of 12:05 a.m., and stated: “The City is experiencing a service outage and is working to restore services.”
According to BleepingComputer, a website that covers technology news, the Royal Ransomware operation is behind the attack.
The outlet said that numerous sources recounted how printers on the City of Dallas’ network printed out ransom notes Wednesday morning. Bleepingcomputer obtained a photo of a ransom note. The outlet said the note helped it to confirm the Royal ransomware operation was responsible.
From The Epoch Times