The Dallas City Council on Wednesday approved two agreements totaling nearly $2.7 million to shore up the city’s IT security, while Dallas County officials try to determine if sensitive information stolen by hackers last month has been leaked online.
Both municipal governments have been hit with cyber attacks this year. The latest City Council approval marks at least $9 million in multiyear agreements geared toward information technology security that Dallas city elected officials have signed off on since April.
Of the two deals approved by the City Council on Wednesday, the largest is a four-year, almost $2.2 million agreement with technology service provider Netsync Network Solutions to help the city buy equipment for a network security management monitoring and response system. City officials told The Dallas Morning News after the council meeting that the deal is meant for the city to continue using an existing network monitoring tool already in place.
“The security operation team will utilize this technology to assist in detection and prevention of network security breach and destruction from malicious traffic,” according to city documents describing the agenda item. “The system ensures the security team shall have adequate security alerts to allow faster response to identified anomalous traffic internally.”
The other agreement is a three-year, more than $510,000 deal for new cloud-based security software the city doesn’t currently have. That software is meant to “secure online communication, protect websites and ensure the authenticity and integrity of digital transactions,” city documents say.
Dallas has approved at least three other similar purchase agreement deals through Netsync related to IT security, city records show.
On April 12, the council approved the city spending almost $2.2 million for a backup and recovery system. On April 26, the council greenlit more than $873,000 for threat detection for city servers, employees’ computers and other devices. And more than $3.9 million was approved on June 28 for a threat and anomaly detection system.
The city council in August approved setting aside nearly $8.6 million to pay vendors for hardware, software, incident response and consulting services in response to the ransomware attack.
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