After insisting it was just “network issues,” the City of Lubbock finally admitted what everyone suspected — a cyberattack shut down city systems on August 12. The first sign of trouble came when the City Council livestream went dark, followed by a blanket outage. Spokesperson Lacey Rose initially denied it was a hack, but the Texas Attorney General’s office contradicted that with a notice confirming a full-blown cyber incident that crippled city operations for days.
According to the city’s official spin, IT staff discovered “potentially malicious code” on a single computer and yanked everything offline “out of an abundance of caution.” They now claim no citizen data was stolen, though it took nearly a week to bring everything back online.
This isn’t Lubbock’s first brush with digital embarrassment. Less than a year ago, the city’s utility payment site was compromised by a fake pop-up stealing credit card info.
Nothing says “trust us with your data” quite like being hacked twice in under a year and pretending it’s not happening.
