Govt. Services Firm Tyler Technologies Hit in Apparent Ransomware Attack

When I worked for a municipality we used software made by this company fairly heavily. They have large headways in several sectors of public administration. I believe in the municipality I worked in the entirety of our municipal court records was backed by their software, as well as our entire water billing system and payroll/HR system as well. Quite a high percentage of municipalities use this company’s software in some aspect, probably more than the average HN reader might expect given that Tyler isn’t necessarily a household name.

My impression of the company after working with their software is about what you might expect: they’ve had a sizable moat for many years which means that they never were really forced to innovate or invest in decent technological infrastructure, meaning that they are pretty susceptible to this sort of attack.

One of my more frustrating moments dealing with their infrastructure was when I needed some water billing data and went to pull it from their system only to discover the entire thing was running in some ancient version of COBOL and that I would have to parse their proprietary flat file database to pull it out.

The worst part of all of the above is that they are actually one of the better public sector vendors in terms of software quality. Which should just demonstrate how bad the quality of public sector software really is.

> Tyler Tech has pivoted on the threat of ransomware as a selling point for many of its services, using its presence on social media to promote ransomware survival guides and incident response checklists. With any luck, the company was following some of its own advice and will weather this storm quickly.

That's going to be an awkward consulting service to sell in the future.