Raphael John-Lall

T&T is lag­ging be­hind oth­er coun­tries in the area of de­tec­tion of cy­ber crimes as well as crimes com­mit­ted in oth­er ar­eas, says Cather­ine Ku­mar, CEO, T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce."In T&T we are lag­ging in this area. It was no­ticed by the pre­vi­ous Gov­ern­ment and one of the ways in com­bat­ting crime is by de­tec­tion. To­day, we have not re­al­ly seen fur­ther im­ple­men­ta­tion of this," she said.

She was speak­ing yes­ter­day at a sem­i­nar en­ti­tled "Se­cur­ing your se­cured da­ta" at the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce of­fice, West­moor­ings.Sheau-Dong Lang, Pro­fes­sor of Dig­i­tal Foren­sics at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cen­tral Flori­da who gave the fea­ture ad­dress by Skype from Flori­da, said in­ter­net se­cu­ri­ty is be­com­ing more com­plex be­cause most peo­ple now have most de­tails of their lives on­line with bank­ing in­for­ma­tion on­line as well as oth­er types of per­son­al in­for­ma­tion.

"Da­ta needs to be safe and se­cure and there are many ways crim­i­nals can take ad­van­tage of the weak­est points. Crim­i­nals are al­so be­com­ing smarter," he said.Ku­mar al­so said T&T needs to fol­low the ex­am­ple of more de­vel­oped so­ci­eties.

"To give an­oth­er ex­am­ple of how com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy can be used to com­bat crime on­ly re­cent­ly in the New York Times there was an ar­ti­cle on the re­tail sec­tor to track em­ploy­ee's theft. For­mer em­ploy­ees who ad­mit to steal­ing were placed on the da­ta base which re­tail stores all over the US had ac­cess to. The sys­tem gave em­ploy­ers the op­tion of lead­ing to bet­ter re­cruit­ment choic­es. I am sure you will agree that this is the best prac­tice we would like to see in T&T," she said.

She al­so said T&T must ex­pand its view of what a crime is."On one hand many of us view crime as mur­der, vi­o­lence and theft how­ev­er hack­ing is al­so a form of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty. Al­though it is not tak­en as se­ri­ous­ly in T&T as in oth­er parts of the world, it is not a light mat­ter," she said.She added that ways must be de­vised so that com­pa­nies can pro­tect the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of their da­ta.

"How do we main­tain the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of our doc­u­ments We need to be aware of what is hap­pen­ing and the nec­es­sary pre­cau­tions to avoid be­ing a vic­tim. How do we avoid loss of da­ta due to tech­nol­o­gy?" she asked.