The city said the attack had only a limited impact on city services, and they were actively working to isolate and remove the ransomware from infected servers.
While the city did not provide more details about the incident, it is clear that ransomware attacks continue to be a growing threat to all types of organizations.
When critical infrastructure is impacted, lives can be at risk, this makes city services a target for ransomware hacker gangs.
Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow said that “Incidents involving US local governments happen at a rate of more than 1 per week.”
“At least 29 have been impacted by ransomware this year, with at least 16 of the 29 have had data stolen. Most of the incidents involve smaller governments and Dallas is, I think, the largest city to be hit in quite some time,” Callow added.
Royal Ransomware
Royal ransomware operations are an offshoot of the Conti cybercrime syndicate. When Conti shut down Royal appeared.
The group began operations in January 2022. And Royal started out using other ransomware operators’ encryptors, such as ALPHV/BlackCat. Later they began using their own encryptor known as Zeon.
