Cherisse Moe

Hack­ers had a field day on Sat­ur­day night af­ter they gained il­lic­it ac­cess to the T&T Par­lia­ment web­site, tem­porar­i­ly re­plac­ing its home page with an­oth­er page and post­ing a warn­ing to the ad­min­is­tra­tors. "Greatz to ad­min your web­site hacked due to se­cu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, patch your web­site, keep it up­dat­ed. Don't wor­ry all your files and your data­base are still here. This is a warn­ing, what oth­er hack­ers can do to your web­site. Keep it in mind...CoD3X."

Cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er, Ja­son El­cock, yes­ter­day con­firmed the at­tack and stat­ed that in­for­ma­tion sys­tem tech­ni­cians and the web­site's ser­vice provider FLOW were cur­rent­ly work­ing to de­ter­mine how the per­pe­tra­tor/s hacked the site. He said the site was back up and run­ning around 4.30 pm yes­ter­day.

"What we are aware of is that our home page was re­placed with an­oth­er page and so per­sons vis­it­ing the site would not have been able to see our page. None of the da­ta was af­fect­ed, but we are do­ing the nec­es­sary se­cu­ri­ty checks to en­sure that when we put it back up we won't have a re­peat of that prob­lem," he said.

El­cock said he did not be­lieve that the in­ci­dent was "an in­side job" but ad­mit­ted that it brought to the fore the need for im­proved In­ter­net se­cu­ri­ty. "I think it's some­one ex­ter­nal­ly who did this. It brought to our at­ten­tion some vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties with­in the sys­tem. "I wouldn't say it was lax but there are things we need to strength­en. Our web­site has been here for 13 years and it's the first time this has hap­pened.

"We are were work­ing to de­ter­mine ex­act­ly what hap­pened and how they were able to do what they did." He added: "It is a se­ri­ous thing. We are go­ing to make sure the nec­es­sary pro­to­cols are strength­ened." When con­tact­ed for com­ment, Suzanne Sa­landy, cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions di­rec­tor, told the T&T Guardian that she was out of the coun­try and was un­aware of the sit­u­a­tion. And at­tempts to reach House Speak­er Wade Mark, yes­ter­day, proved fu­tile.