Killeen Responds to BlackSuit Hack

Killeen was working to fully restore services after cyber gang BlackSuit broke into its internal systems Aug. 7.

BlackSuit is a rebranding of Royal, according to the Cybersecurity and Information Security Administration. Royal was behind last year’s attack on the city of Dallas.

Issues remained early this week:

• The Killeen Police Department on Monday told the KilleenDaily Herald that there were still problems with its records management system.
• There was a ransom request, but the city didn’t pay, according to the news outlet.
• Utility Collections were still affected Tuesday, according to the city website.
• The city doesn’t believe personal or financial information was compromised, the website announcement said.

The city announced the breach online, saying the citizen disruption was minimal. The city doesn’t believe personal or financial information was compromised.

“Upon discovering the intrusion, our IT department immediately took steps to secure our systems and prevent further unauthorized access,” the announcement said. “This included proactively disabling the utility customer service payment system to protect customer information. The department has been working diligently on restoring servers through a backup system.”

Killeen’s incident response included:

• Communicating with residents
• Communicating with the Texas Department of Information Resources
• Ceasing connection to the Bell County Network
• Reviewing all systems
• Restoring municipal court and transfer station operations the same day

Killeen, in Bell County, has a population of about 160,000. Willie Resto is the IT executive director, and the IT internal services fund has a proposed budget of $6.7 million.