A Dallas County committee that oversees computer safety and the county's IT department sounded alarms months before a recent ransomware attack.
Dallas County was the target of what officials described as a "cybersecurity incident" on Oct. 19. Officials are still working to determine the scope of the attack. Kroll, a cybersecurity firm and longtime county vendor, is investigating the recent data attack.
Among county system security concerns raised at September and October meetings of the IT Executive Governance Committee were password, public network, data and document disposal and reCAPTCHA weaknesses.
The IT department's 2024 budget is over $70 million — up from last year’s nearly $58 million. IT maintenance and subscriptions cost more than $14.5 million in the 2023 budget.
The IT department got money for more contract workers to handle employee help requests, fix system problems and safeguard against potential threats — including viruses and virtual attacks.
The county's top IT official told the committee that would help a lot.
“I have the resources I need now, building the muscle we need to deal with any potential incidents that are coming our way,” Collins Dibaki, Chief Information Security Officer, told the IT committee in September.
In August — at a cost of nearly $500,000 — the county also had approved a study of the Dallas IT department to similar counties, leadership competency assessment and improvement suggestions.
And in June, county commissioners approved almost $84,000 to strengthen the county’s firewall for “continuous cybersecurity risk mitigation and compliance.”
Questions about the county's cybersecurity measures continue to weigh heavily on commissioners.
“You know, my concern is here we are navigating how do I say this nicely navigating treacherous waters,” Garcia said at the commissioners court meeting recently. “You know, when it's very challenging for every single department, moving more pieces that we don't know where they're going, and we don't have the people to solve it if these pieces do not work.”
Commissioner John Wiley Price also raised concerns at that meeting.
“Let's just put it on the record,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, we've been probing IT.”
Price said Dibaki has been an effective IT chief, but doesn’t specifically oversee cybersecurity investigations.
Committee members hope the Gartner report will explain what's working — and what's not — in the county's computer systems.
County commissioners sometimes have hesitated to approve or increase funding before knowing whether the Gartner study shows the potential risks and the efficiency of some platforms or software.
“…At this point, I'm just going to abstain,” Garcia said at the recent commissioners court meeting. “I mean, we're having a study coming. We have no director. We have the same structure that made the same decisions that obviously were not probably timely.”
Public and private organizations across the country and state have become data breach and ransomware victims, including West Texas gas company, Austin Meals on Wheels, a San Antonio dental office and Texas’s own Medicaid.
A May 3 cyberattack compromised personal information for more than 25,000 Dallas city personnel. The benefits-related information was 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.
The Dallas Central Appraisal District also was the target of a cyberattack about a year ago.
KERA's Megan Cardona contributed to this report.
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