Coppell Chronicle Vol. 4, No. 37
Coppell’s Government Hit by Cyberattack • Emergency Dispatchers to Get New Home • More Hotels Planned Within City Limits • Developer Spills Tea on Stalled Projects
Election Day is Tuesday, but a whopping 17,966 Coppell residents have already cast their ballots. That number includes 434 voters who live in the Denton County portion of the city.
I’m just sitting here imagining what it would be like if half of those people were paid subscribers to a Coppell-centric newsletter.
Coppell’s Government Hit by Cyberattack
This is shaping up to be quite a dramatic year for Coppell. In the spring, we experienced intense winds that led to piles of debris throughout the city. In the summer, we had an extremely rare alligator sighting. And in the fall, the city government is dealing with a cyberattack.
The incident began on Oct. 23. That morning, the city issued an alert on social media about “an outage with our phones and several other systems.” The outage was briefly noted in last Sunday’s edition, which included a link to a statement in which City Manager Mike Land thanked residents “for your patience and grace as we work to restore our systems.”
Last Tuesday afternoon, I learned that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s website had identified Coppell as the victim of a cyberattack. According to the “Public Information” chapter of the Texas Government Code, a governmental body that can’t adhere to that chapter’s requirements due to a catastrophe must inform the attorney general’s office. Coppell submitted an initial catastrophe notice on Oct. 23, and an extension was filed on Tuesday.
“The City and the services it provides are drastically reduced and limited,” said the initial notice filed by Sarah-Grace French, a lawyer who has represented Coppell in other dealings with the attorney general. “City staff is unable to access all City documents, files, data, and relevant records management systems. The City is working very carefully and deliberately to bring its network back online.”
The city’s official communications didn’t make any references to criminals or an attack until Wednesday, when Chief Communications Strategist Hannah Cook issued a release that included “cyber security incident” in the headline.
“The City has extensive trainings, tools, and systems in place to help prevent these types of events from being successful, and these security measures helped to minimize the overall impact,” Land said in Wednesday’s release. “Nonetheless, bad actors were able to disrupt our network environment, and we have reason to believe that some of the older data on one of our servers could have been impacted as a result. Our investigation into the full scope of data affected remains ongoing.”
Despite the disruptions, the city’s website has a page dedicated to the incident that details which systems have been affected and also features a set of answers to frequently asked questions. One of those questions is “Was sensitive resident data affected?” This is the beginning of the answer:
“The City has reason to believe that there was potentially sensitive resident information on one of the servers impacted in the incident. The server was rendered inoperable as a result of this incident, and the City is in the process of restoring from backups and more thoroughly assessing the types of data contained therein.”
Coppell joins a growing list of governments and companies that have been targeted by cybercriminals. In the past year, Dallas County, Delta Air Lines, and Frontier Communications have all been affected. Given how widespread these attacks have become, vigilantly checking your credit cards and bank accounts for fraudulent activity is a wise practice.
Let’s close this article with a bit of good news: On Friday afternoon, access to the city’s phones was restored.
Emergency Dispatchers to Get New Home
Although the phones at city facilities were unavailable for several days, Coppell residents were still able to report emergencies by dialing 911. Coincidentally, I was already working on an article about such calls.
Ten years ago, Coppell teamed up with three neighboring cities — Addison, Carrollton, and Farmers Branch — to establish the North Texas Emergency Communications Center (NTECC). The dispatchers who work there answer calls from residents of all four cities and then communicate with the appropriate city’s first responders. The center’s Board of Directors includes the four city managers, and the four cities’ police chiefs and fire chiefs constitute its Operations Advisory Committee.