Travis Central Appraisal District (TCAD) which looks into the market evaluation process of public and private properties in Travis County, Texas has admitted that it became a victim of a ransomware attack on September 11th,2019. However, the District organization says that it did not bow down to the demands of hackers and will recover its data assets within a few working days.
As per the update was given to Cybersecurity Insiders, the real estate federal organization says that it became aware of the incident at 9:30 PM on Sept 11 and learned that the malware encrypted data related to property search, phone, email, and computer-assisted mass appraisal systems.
Upon discovery of the incident, the IT department started taking measures to contain the incident which reduced the impact to a great extent.
Furthermore, the Austin based federal agency notified the facts to the law enforcement the next day and started engaging Cybersecurity experts to investigate the incident.
How the ransomware infection spread to the TCAD is yet to be determined.
All core systems were restored by September 19th, 2019 says the media update given by Marya Crigler, the Chief Appraiser, Travis Central Appraisal District.
Note- A spokesperson from the TCAD says that they aren’t sure whether to relate the incident to the recent ransomware attack which took place on 22 cities and municipalities operating in the state of Texas. But admit that the attack bore similarities to the stated cyber incident of Texas.
