FBI Reports Texas Among Top States Victimized By Cybercrime In 2019

As cybercrimes continue to plague Texas school districts and cities in 2020, a recent report by the FBI shows the state was one of the most-targeted in the country last year.

The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) released its 2019 Internet Crime Report on February 11 that showed Texas tied with Florida for the second most victims per state last year with 27,178, when complainants provided state information. California was No. 1 with 50,132 victims.

Texas was fourth in total losses by victims per state with $221.54 million in reported losses in 2019. California again was first with $573.62 million in reported losses.

For count by subject per state, Texas ranked third with 10,093 counts of cybercrime in 2019. California was first with 17,517, and Florida reported 11,047.

Twenty-two local agencies and governments in Texas were the victims of a ransomware attack on August 16 that shut down or crippled financial systems and other critical operations.

The K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center reports that criminals have extorted at least six school districts in Texas since 2017. Overall, school districts are the second-most targeted organization for cyberattacks in the United States.

Manor ISD recently reported it lost $2.3 million in a targeted email phishing scam in November 2019. Cybercriminals also stole $2 million from Crowley ISD and $600,000 from Henderson ISD last year. Port Neches-Groves ISD paid $35,000 in a bitcoin ransom to regain access to its IT systems in December.

A recent ransomware attack crippled computer systems at Nacogdoches ISD (NISD) this week.

NISD detected the ransomware attack on February 11, which encrypted and locked files on PCs rendering them unreadable. However, district officials said the attackers do not have access to the information contained in those files.

As a precaution, the district shut down its network and all PCs to prevent the spread of the virus. It transferred some work to portable devices that are on a different operating system and resorted to using paper files for recordkeeping.

District officials are investigating if they were victims of the same attack that struck the city of Garrison, Texas, on February 10 and have reached out to the FBI and state authorities, such as the Texas Education Agency, for assistance.

This story originally published by Strategic Partnership.