September
Tyler Technologies Ransomware
PUBLISHED: Sept. 23, 2020
Tyler Technologies, the nation’s largest provider of software and technology services for the public sector, has reportedly been the victim of a ransomware attack. Notably, the company is responsible for the development of software used to display state and local election results.
Though initially hesitant to discuss the exact nature of the disruption, Tyler Technologies released the following public statement Wednesday afternoon:
“Based on the evidence available to-date, all indications are that the impact of this incident is limited to our internal corporate network and phone systems, and that there has been no impact on software we host for our clients. Our hosted environment is separate and segregated from our internal corporate environment.”
The company, based out of Plano, Texas, employs some 5,300 employees and brought in a reported annual revenue of more than $1 billion for fiscal year 2019. It sells a broad range of services to state and local governments, including appraisal and tax software, integrated software for courts and justice agencies, enterprise financial software systems, public safety software, records/document management software solutions and transportation software solutions for schools.
By Tuesday, Tyler Technologies’ normal landing page was replaced with notice saying the site was offline. At the time of the original change, the message contained no further details regarding the breach. Tyler’s Chief Information Officer Matt Bieri provided a statement to popular security blog KrebsOnSecurity only after markets that day closed, stating
“Upon discovery and out of an abundance of caution, we shut down points of access to external systems and immediately began investigating and remediating the problem. We have since engaged outside IT security and forensics experts to conduct a detailed review and help us securely restore affected equipment. We are implementing enhanced monitoring systems, and we have notified law enforcement.”
Tyler Technologies has thus far declined to state how the intrusion might be affecting its customers. Several IT staffers affiliated with state and local governments throughout the nation have reported interruptions of various natures, with one anonymously stating that the outage has disrupted the ability of people to pay their water bills or court payments.
Depending on how long it takes for Tyler Technologies to recover from this incident, it could have a broad impact on the ability of many states and localities to process payments for services or provide various government resources online.
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