Dallas County is looking at a bigger bill to clean up its data breach problems.
Identifying whose information was affected and how to help them requires almost half a million dollars over original estimates.
An $800,000 estimate to remove hard drives from computers that the county accidentally sold was included in a vendor's original statement of work. No data leak issues have been associated with those sales.
That vendor, Identity Theft Guard Solutions, is now also managing for almost $50,000 a call center and free credit monitoring for people whose information was affected.
Another firm, Arete Advisors, was paid $375,000 to data mine for about 3 months “too voluminous” files that were stolen by hackers in October and potentially compromised on the dark web.
Those files were downloaded by Kroll, another company hired by the county to sort the data theft problems.
County commissioner Andy Sommerman said the firm’s help is needed.
"We know that there is a set of information that's on the dark web, but it's very labor intensive to figure out what it is, and we want to know what it is," he said.
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