Candy Evans: DCAD’s Online Outage ‘Giving Everyone More Headaches’

The long duration of the Dallas Central Appraisal District online outage has had an impact on North Texas real estate agents, Candy Evans of CandysDirt.com told NBC5 Wednesday.

“It’s giving everyone more headaches, more work, and slowing the whole process down,” Evans said. “They’re down to working on paper.”

The cyberattack on DCAD became publicly known on Nov. 8. The website remains offline but can redirect visitors to a state-mandated landing page that counties must link to when setting the tax rate.

Cheryl Jordan with DCAD told NBC 5 that IT employees are working around the clock to rebuild databases and get the website functional again.

Ransomware attacks usually happen when someone within a targeted organization unsuspectingly clicks on a link that contains malicious code. The goal is to have the compromised organization pay a ransom to regain data access.

“Most likely someone clicked on a link and it invaded the DCAD system,” Patrick Costello, co-founder and principal of evolvemga.com told CandysDirt.com on Nov. 17. “Do not click on unknown emails ever, and be especially careful transferring money.”

DCAD appraises property values and processes protests in addition to handling homestead exemptions. The office is unable to process those exemptions, Jordan told The Dallas Morning News.

Jordan said the Dallas County tax office is not affected. Homeowners who need to pay property taxes before the Jan. 31 deadline, can still do so, she said.

“We can collect information,” Jordan said. “We just can’t do anything with them right now.”

The FBI has been contacted about this attack, according to reports.