Printers spewed demands for money. Workers were blocked from files and residents from paying their bills. Across Texas in the summer of 2019, similar scenes played out in two dozen communities hit by a Russia-based cyberattack.
. But the Texas attacks — which, unlike these prominent cases, were resolved without a ransom payment — make clear that ransomware need not hit vital infrastructure or major corporations to interrupt daily life.
One of his client’s servers was unresponsive, he was told. Upon inspection, Myers noticed that someone who wasn’t supposed to be in the computer system was trying to install something remotely. He rebooted the server. Things initially seemed fixed until the department called back: One of its laptops had a ransom note on it.“I don’t think you can begin to express the terror that goes through your mind when something like that starts to unfold,” he said.
Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.
One councilmember, a military veteran named Milton Ooley, cautioned against publicity for the hackers’ “form of terrorism.” “That was probably our biggest number one,” Sereno said. “That’s what’s considered critical infrastructure, when you talk about water.” “That’s been at these officers’ fingertips for years, and then all of a sudden, they don’t have that anymore,” Bullock said. Officers, he added, “kind of had to go back to old school.”
One complication: TSM’s customer list was itself encrypted, though eventually a copy was procured, officials said. State officials didn’t immediately know which communities had been victimized. They called around asking, “Were you impacted? Were you impacted? Were you impacted?” said Nancy Rainosek, Texas’ chief information security officer.
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