Russian Hackers Attack Harlingen Police Department

The Valley Morning Star in Harlingen reported that the city’s police department was hacked by a Russian “cyber extortion group” early Monday morning.

After an interview with City Manager Gabriel Gonzalez, the news outlet reported the breach happened about 2 a.m. Monday and was detected by 4 a.m., resulting in the city shutting down the compromised system followed by phone and Internet services as a preventive measure.

The Texas Department of Public Safety Cyber Security unit launched an investigation Monday, Gonzalez said.

High points of the story include:

• Data was encrypted early Monday
• Officials don’t believe any data was stolen
• Data is backed up in the cloud
• City financial data wasn’t attacked
• Officials believe they will be back online by Friday

“Because of the times we live in, we made major improvements to the IT department years ago so if something like this happened, we could overcome it,” Gonzalez said. “All this is an inconvenience. We’re just going to rebuild our data. We’re reformatting hard drives. We should be 100 percent by the end of the week.”