The City of Dallas is dealing with a ransomware attack that took the Dallas Police Department website offline but so far appears to have limited impact on city services for residents, the city said in a statement on Wednesday.
City officials have “confirmed that a number of servers have been compromised with ransomware, impacting several functional areas,” including the police department’s website, the statement said.
Officials are working to contain the spread of the malicious software from city computer systems and to restore any affected services.
“The Dallas Police Department is being affected by an outage in the city,” Kristin Lowman, a public information officer for the department, told CNN in an email. She did not respond to a question on how the hack is affecting the Dallas Police Department.
There were reports of computer outages or connectivity issues at other Dallas government agencies on Wednesday afternoon.
A computer system that processes records for the Dallas Court and Detention Services Department has been down since 6 a.m. local time on Wednesday, according to a person who answered the phone at the department Wednesday afternoon but declined to give their full name.
“Our system went completely down so there’s not much we can see in terms of looking up people’s citations and traffic tickets,” the person said, adding they were unsure what caused the outage.
CNN has requested comment from the FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on the Dallas hack.
This isn’t the first time that a big American city’s police department has been impacted by ransomware. A Russian-speaking criminal group leaked online a trove of data stolen from the Washington, DC, Police Department in 2021.
Ransomware attacks typically lock computer files so hackers can…
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