Last Friday, 23 small Texas towns were hit by a coordinated ransomware attack that appears to have been pulled off by one single threat actor according to the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR).
A Texas DIR spokesperson told The New York Times that the majority of the targets were specific departments in the towns. In a statement to Gizmodo, the Texas DIR declined to specify which towns or departments, saying it did not want to make the “impacted entities” a target for other bad actors.
It’s not clear how these towns are dealing with the issue, but it doesn’t seem like they’re just paying up to make the problem go away. A DIR spokesperson told NPR that he was not aware of any of the affected towns paying the ransom.
According to the Times on Monday the affected departments remain offline. They may be trying to track down that single culprit first. NPR reports that the FBI and Texas cybersecurity experts are investigating the attack.
Now at moment it is not known how bad the impact has been by this attack as there is no information available. We need to wait for the Texas DIR to share more about the attack before we know how much damage it has caused.
