The American city of Dallas in Texas is still recovering from a damaging cyber attack that struck two weeks ago. The city is struggling to restore its systems after cybercriminals from the Royal group encrypted data in a number of city systems for the police, firefighters, courts and other services causing chaos across the board. The police are being forced to keep all notes manually, while firefighters are not receiving enough information from dispatchers which may lead them to accidentally attend the wrong address. According to Dallas authorities, full restoration could take several more weeks.
Although the city managed to partially restore the operation of communication systems for the police and firefighters last week, police sergeant Sheldon Smith explained that checking vehicles or licenses which used to take a few seconds before, now takes between five and ten minutes. He added that officers should adapt while the city overcomes the current difficulties.
While the main concern to the city at the moment is the restoration of some of its core systems to ensure it works optimally as soon as possible, Brian Gardner, the Chief Information Security Specialist responsible for the restoration of systems, said that no signs have emerged indicating that the vital data of residents, suppliers, or employees had leaked into open access. However, he added that due to the difficulty in checking, cleaning and restoring systems, full functionality may not return for a few weeks.
The Dallas authorities state that they are currently studying all options for eliminating the consequences of the incident, but they cannot comment on specific details as it might affect the investigation or reveal additional vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. Meanwhile, cyber attacks against American cities have become increasingly frequent. Recently, the city of Auckland in California was affected by an attack from Play Group, a malicious software that disrupted the city’s internal systems for a prolonged duration and resulted in the breach of a vast volume of sensitive data of local officials and residents. Besides this, cyber attacks were registered in Owell and the districts of Curry and Spartanburg.