Mission residents worry about cyber attack

MISSION, Texas (ValleyCentral) — The City of Mission City Council held an emergency meeting on Saturday morning to discuss the cyber incident. After 31 minutes of executive session, the city council decided to extend its disaster declaration.

Mission residents like Selene Guerrero and others are worried about the current situation and what it means for them.

“That is very telling of the severity of this issue as obviously they don’t have a clear grasp on it or control over this situation that they had to issue out this declaration and ask for that support from the governor of Texas," Guerrero said.

The attack left police officers without the ability to run license plates and driver’s licenses through state databases. Some police laptops even stopped working.

"Almost all of us depend on technology nowadays, and we don't know how this will affect us," said Reynaldo Jimenez. "Let's hope it's something temporary and doesn't happen again."

Residents believe the city has not been fully transparent considering the attack happened in late February and the community is just now hearing about it.

“I believe there should be some opportunity for the residents of this community to ask questions as they do have a post on Facebook and the comments are disabled, so we can’t asked questions and we don’t know what the next steps are, we don’t know what type of data was compromised and those are all real big concerns," Guerrero said.

During the emergency meeting, the city council decided to extend the emergency declaration for another week.

Details surrounding the cyber attack were discussed behind closed doors in executive session.
Guerrero hopes the city will provide more details soon.

“I think there should be some form of townhall or open meeting or an opened meeting where we could can ask those questions or where they can answer those questions for us even if it is issuing out a message in our social media, sending us an email as they have their information or can they not access that," Guerrero said.

After the meeting, the City Council said they would not comment on the issue as it is a confidential matter.