FORT WORTH, Texas — Since hackers hit the City of Dallas Thursday, it's been an intense 24 hours for the City of Fort Worth's IT Solutions team.
They're not letting their guard down anytime soon. Inside the situation room, the team plays defense hour after hour. It's their job to protect the city's data.
"We protect a lot of information. We have information about our citizens and the businesses that do with the city," said Fort Worth Chief Technology Officer Kevin Gunn. "So, everything from our utility billing to court information to police and fire information. Also, we have a lot of financial information that some people might find valuable to them. The last 24 hours has been kind of a hyper of activity here in Fort Worth."
Since Gunn and his team learned about hackers hitting Dallas with ransom-ware, it's been all hands on deck. Each IT member is assigned areas to check. So far, they've avoided getting hacked, and this team is no stranger to cyber attacks.
"We block about a quarter million emails each day as potential threats to our computing systems," Gunn said. "We see people trying to access our computer systems over the Internet thousands of times each hour."
The hourly threats come as no surprise to cyber analysis expert Brett Callow, who not only shared the main ways hackers get in but what the hackers want most.
"Money, plain and simple," said Callow. "The three main ways are email with malicious attachments or bad links, unpatched internet facing servers or compromised user credentials. Somebody tricked into giving a password."
Callow says the worst-case scenario is hackers accessing and threatening to release police investigation information. So, with the Dallas malware threat being so close, Fort Worth's IT situation room will stay active for now.
Gunn's team includes nine IT Experts who are working different shifts around the clock. Technology even allows some team members to work remotely, especially when the team has an alert.
Gunn said his team is even looking back as far as 180 days for suspicious malware or unauthorized access.
All City of Fort Worth employees are required to complete cyber safety training. Gunn is also facilitating reminders to each department and even contractors because of the recent ransomware threat to the City of Dallas. His team has also reached out to Dallas to offer assistance.
"It's a constant and evolving activity that we have to be on top of," said Kevin Gunn.