Case Study: City of Amarillo achieves prevention of costly data breaches and stronger incident response with Secureworks Emergency Incident Response

Secureworks Teams Up With City of Amarillo to Prevent Costly Data Breaches

The City of Amarillo, the largest city in the Texas Panhandle (about 2,400 employees), discovered a Log4J vulnerability on its Horizon servers while in the middle of segmentation and a Zero Trust rollout and observed signs of lateral movement indicating an attempted breach. Although the internal team reacted swiftly and evicted the threat actor, the city engaged Secureworks and its Emergency Incident Response service to provide additional incident response expertise and hands‑on training for its engineers.

Secureworks deployed its Emergency Incident Response team to provide 24/7 incident command, rapid investigation, remediation guidance, and knowledge transfer to Amarillo’s staff. The engagement prevented any data loss, helped the city fast‑track its Zero Trust implementation—“essentially did six months of work in 10 days”—and delivered measurable reductions in cyber risk, third‑party validation, and lasting improvements to the city’s incident response capabilities.

City of Amarillo

Rich Gagnon

Assistant City Manager and Chief Information Officer