The City of Dallas, Texas was affected by a large cyberattack on Wednesday. Several services were impacted by the ransomware. Reports said that police and 911 systems took a hit.

According to reports by local media, Dallas City’s police communications and IT systems were shut down on Monday morning due to a suspected ransomware attack. Dallas is the 9th largest city in the US, with a population of around 2.6 million people, according to US Census data.

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The attack has forced 911 dispatchers to manually note down received reports for responding officers rather than submit them online through the computer-assisted dispatch system.

The Dallas County Police Department’s official website was also down for some time due to the security breach but has since been restored. Later, it was confirmed that the disruption was caused due to ransomware attacks.

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On Wednesday afternoon, there were complaints of computer outages or connectivity issues at several other Dallas government agencies.

The system that processes records for the Dallas Court and Detention Services Department was down since 6 am on Wednesday, according to a report by CNN.

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The hackers said that they encrypted the city’s critical information and threatened to leak sensitive information online.

The city said it is working to “isolate the ransomware to prevent its spread, to remove the ransomware from infected servers, and to restore any services currently impacted,” according to a statement released on Wednesday afternoon.

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The statement also added that it was working to assess the full impact of the attack. “Should a resident experience a problem with a particular City service, they should contact 311. For emergencies, they should contact 911,” the statement added.

Quentin Rhoads-Herrera, CEO of Vector0, a Dallas-based cybersecurity company, said he is called to test the cybersecurity of state and local governments, “we commonly find their security posture to be weaker than that of an average corporate company.”

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“This is not due to a lack of concern, but rather a lack of resources and manpower to address the ever-growing challenges of cybersecurity,” he added.