Texas city takes systems offline after cyberattack

The government of Abilene, Texas, has shut down some of its systems due to a cyberattack.

City officials said they became aware of the incident on Friday when they received reports of unresponsive servers within the city’s internal network. IT staff immediately began disconnecting the affected systems and cybersecurity experts have been hired to investigate the issue. 

“Out of an abundance of caution, certain systems have been taken offline. However, emergency services are still up and running with the continued ability to timely assist, and no unidentified financial activity has been detected,” the city said on Monday.

Due to the outages, none of the card systems at government offices are working, forcing people to pay with cash or checks. The city pledged to not shut off utilities due to overdue accounts and said payments can also be made online with cards. 

“While systems and telephones are being brought back online, you may experience a slower than normal response to service requests. We are reviewing email requests and will respond as quickly as possible,” the city added.

The IT team is monitoring the city’s systems to watch for any unusual activity and has been working to restore services. 

Government officials provided phone numbers people can call for water-related emergencies or other incidents requiring immediate help. They acknowledged that incident recovery is a “time-intensive process” and more will be learned about the scope of the attack over the next few weeks. 

The city declined to comment about whether it is dealing with a ransomware attack or if federal authorities have been notified. 

Abilene has more than 130,000 residents and is about three hours west of Dallas and Fort Worth, two cities that recently dealt with their own service-impacting cyberattacks.

Since the ransomware attack on the city of Dallas in 2023, multiple government bodies across Texas have dealt with cyber incidents — including Dallas County, Tarrant County and Wichita County as well as the cities of Fort Worth, Killeen, Richardson, Coppell, McKinney, and Lubbock. 

This year, both Matagorda County and the city of Mission declared states of emergency following cyberattacks that grievously impacted critical services. 

Cyber issues gained enough prominence within the state that Gov. Greg Abbott announced in February a new Texas Cyber Command based in San Antonio that they hope will “anticipate and detect” potential cyber threats, promote cyber awareness and prepare for attacks through coordination and planning.  

“In just the past week or so, a cyberattack has hit a city, has hit a hospital, has hit a prominent business, and this happens week after week, and it’s increasing,” Abbott said during a speech announcing the initiative two months ago.

“We cannot let any more time go by without strongly addressing this problem, and that is why I’m calling for an emergency item to create the Texas Cyber Command to better secure our state from cyberattacks.”