DALLAS (WBAP/KLIF) – The City of Dallas said on Monday that its network is more than 90% restored after a ransomware attack last month.
The city released a statement saying it greatly appreciates the public’s support and patience as officials continue to investigate and address the cybersecurity incident that occurred on May 3.
“Our staff has worked tirelessly to restore and rebuild systems and return all systems to full functionality as quickly and securely as possible,” the statement read. “At this time, we are more than 90 percent restored, with most public-facing services restored. We continue working diligently to restore full functionality as quickly as possible and will continue to keep the community informed with relevant updates throughout this process.”
The city said that as it completes restoration, it will be upgrading software and functionality at the Dallas Public Library to better serve Library patrons.
“Serving our residents remains a top priority, and while we restored most services, our team of experts continues working day and night towards full recovery. Most City services continued throughout this incident to successful planning and preparation,” that city said. “Dallas Police Department, Dallas Fire-Rescue, 911 and 311 rose to the challenge and took quick action to implement workarounds to meet residents’ needs, answering and responding to incoming calls despite a brief interruption to our Computer Aided Dispatch system. Backup measures immediately allowed service to continue until we brought systems back online May 6. Shortly thereafter, the City restored CAD functionality, and emergency dispatch has remained operational throughout this event. Similarly, we restored Dallas Water Utilities’ payment system and meter reading software.”
After undergoing a planned outage while crews performed an upgrade, Dallas Municipal Court reopened as scheduled Tuesday, May 30.
The Dallas Public Library continues to manually track the availability of items borrowed while the reservation system remains offline. Library patrons can continue borrowing, though have been advised not to return items until system functionality is restored.
Workarounds remain in place as the city builds on its restoration progress with a focus on public safety and public-facing services – including Dallas Animal Services.
“We continue to work with our cybersecurity experts on additional steps to further enhance our security posture, including implementing additional cybersecurity software, deploying a system-wide reset across all user accounts, expediting the implementation of additional controls, and completely rebuilding impacted systems in a new, secure environment,” the statement concluded.
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