Dallas County on Monday confirmed an investigation into what it's calling a "cybersecurity incident" that hit county systems more than a week ago.
The incident comes about five months after a cyberattack that compromised the personal information of 26,212 Dallas city personnel.
In a statement, County Judge Clay Jenkins said officials were notified of the breach on Oct. 19. The county has enlisted an outside cybersecurity firm to conduct a comprehensive forensic investigation into the incident, he said.
As of Monday, it was unclear who in the county was impacted by the cybersecurity attack or its scope.
"As the investigation is still ongoing, we do not want to make premature assumptions about the extent of impact or other details, which may evolve as the forensic investigation advances," Jenkins said in the statement.
On May 3, the city of Dallas was hit with a ransomware attack by an "unauthorized third party," which impacted benefits-related information maintained by the city’s human resources department.
Later that month the hacker group Royal threatened to leak sensitive information via their blog. At the time, city officials released a statement saying they were aware of the threat.
In late June, the Dallas City Council approved a $3.9 million cybersecurity contract, with little discussion. The contract authorized the city manager to pay the consulting group Netsync for “support of a threat and anomaly detection system” for the city’s IT department.
For weeks following that incident, Dallas officials claimed no sensitive information was accessed. But three months later, the city confirmed it had known personnel information was likely compromised as early as June 14.
The data breach included city names, addresses, Social Security numbers, medical information and health insurance information.
This story has been updated to note the City of Dallas ransomware attack was on May 3.
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