DALLAS — On May 3, the city of Dallas’ computers went dark. Their network was hit by a ransomware attack.
And it has been a headache getting it back up and running.
"The painstaking work involved a comprehensive review of each system and each device to make sure they are free of malware,” said Bill Zielinsky, Dallas chief information officer.
Each computer, including the ones in every police car and fire department vehicle, are being checked.
"We are still working through the bugs of the system and having to rebuild a lot of the systems,” said Dallas Fire-Rescue Chief Dominique Artis.
Meanwhile, all reports, including those taken at crime scenes, had to be handwritten and now manually imputed. That means police officers are spending hours every day uploading their reports that have piled up for weeks.
"It’s been very impactful. We’ve struggled a little bit this last month,” said Dallas Police Department Chief Eddie Garcia.
The city says 90% of the computer network is back up and running, but it will take time to be at 100%.
"While we have made progress in our restoration of services – there is still much work to be done,” said Zielinsky.
And the investigation into the group that did this continues, including the claim that citizens and employee’s private information was stolen.
“If the investigation determines that individual’s person information has been involved in the theft of data, we will notify those individuals and provide resources to help protect their information in accordance with applicable law,” said Zielinsky.
The FBI continues its criminal investigation into the group that has taken credit for this but have not released any new information on their progress.
Meanwhile, the city says it has put more security measures in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again, but there are still a lot of questions about how it happened in the first place.