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On Wednesday, local authorities admitted that a number of the city’s systems had “been compromised with ransomware,” resulting in significant service interruptions. Currently inactive is the website for the Dallas Police Department (DPD). The City of Dallas’ website states that “the City is experiencing a service outage and is working to restore services,” and the city stated on a page with updates regarding the problem that all courts were closed on Wednesday and will be closed once more on Thursday.
Melinda Gutierrez, a spokesman for DPD, acknowledged that the outage has also affected “CAD” systems, which are utilized by dispatchers and 911 operators to prioritize and record incident calls. This, according to local media, has had 911 phone takers manually record instructions for incoming cops.
Apparently, on Wednesday morning, printers connected to the City of Dallas network started generating ransom letters. A copy of the message indicates that the Royal ransomware group has taken credit for the assault, and a URL on the note pointed to a contact form on Royal’s Dark Web victims site. The message claimed that crucial information was encrypted and threatened to make it public online if the ransom demand was not paid.
The sorts of data that have been taken are yet unknown, and the City of Dallas has not yet been posted on Royal’s Dark Web leak site. Inquiries from TechCrunch have gone unanswered by city officials.
A joint alert from CISA and the FBI was just published on the Royal ransomware group, which first appeared in early 2022. The gang has targeted several victims both domestically and abroad, including businesses engaged in manufacturing, communications, education, and healthcare, according to the American federal agencies.
It’s yet unclear how much damage was caused by the strike. The city issued a statement stating that it was “actively striving to isolate the ransomware to avoid its spread, to eliminate the ransomware from compromised servers, and to recover any services already affected.” Although there hasn’t been much of an impact yet on how the City delivers services to its residents, it’s currently working to determine the full impact.