Almost two months after a ransomware attack disrupted City of Dallas online services, council members voted to approve a multi-million-dollar contract for upgraded cybersecurity software.
Council members approved the $3.9 million measure without comment. The agreement between the city and Texas based IT consulting group Netsync, was tucked away in the council’s lengthy consent agenda.
The contract authorizes the city manager to pay Netsync immediately after council approval. Council members also discussed the ongoing ransomware attack that started in early May, among other issues, in executive session during Wednesday's meeting.
There was no public discussion of the agreement during Wednesday's meeting, but according to the approved item, the funds are for support of a threat and anomaly detection system for” the city’s IT department.
On May 3, the city was hit by the hacker group Royal, which impacted a number of city systems. Those included the Dallas Police Department, Dallas Fire Rescue, 911 and 311 — the city’s nonemergency service.
Other city services brought down as a result of the attack were the Dallas Water Utilities department, the municipal court building and the public library system. For the duration of the attack — which the city is still recovering from — officials maintained that there was “no indication that customer information…has been leaked from City systems.”
The assurances came after the hacker group posted a message on their blog threatening the release of “tons of personal information of employees (phones, addresses, credit cards, SSNs, passports)…” the post said.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a warning about the Royal hacker group in early March.
Got a tip? Email Nathan Collins at ncollins@kera.org. You can follow Nathan on Twitter @nathannotforyou.
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