Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Com­mer­cial banks across T&T have been put on alert af­ter a se­cu­ri­ty breach which has put large num­bers of Visa and Mas­ter­Card deb­it and cred­it cards across the Caribbean at risk.The breach came to light af­ter a na­tion­wide cred­it-card re­call across banks in the Ba­hamas in late Feb­ru­ary.

Fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions there were on high alert as they scram­bled to pro­tect the funds of thou­sands of con­sumers whose cred­it cards were com­pro­mised by a ma­jor da­ta breach. As a re­sult, banks in the Ba­hamas had to reis­sue thou­sands of cards.

The Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion of Banks (CAB) is­sued a se­cu­ri­ty alert yes­ter­day, say­ing banks and oth­er fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions had been af­fect­ed by the breach at a da­ta cen­tre in Bar­ba­dos, where sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion on the ac­counts of thou­sands of card­hold­ers was stolen.

CAB ad­vised card­hold­ers that "out of an abun­dance of cau­tion" banks and cred­it unions might be con­tact­ing cus­tomers to have their cards re­placed. It stressed that those mea­sures were pre­cau­tion­ary as no fraud had yet been de­tect­ed.

"Our mem­ber banks and oth­er fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions through­out the re­gion take client con­fi­den­tial­i­ty and se­cu­ri­ty very se­ri­ous­ly and pro­vide as­sur­ance that cus­tomer in­ter­est re­mains sound­ly pro­tect­ed," CAB said in a state­ment.

The as­so­ci­a­tion added those mea­sures were pre­cau­tion­ary and no fraud had been at­trib­uted to this case. The CAB has mem­bers in 17 Caribbean coun­tries, in­clud­ing T&T.Re­gion­al me­dia re­ports said the un­named in­ter­na­tion­al card-pro­cess­ing fa­cil­i­ty in Bar­ba­dos had been hacked last month.

The An­tigua Ob­serv­er re­port­ed last week that four lo­cal fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions had been af­fect­ed by the se­cu­ri­ty breach, though no cas­es of fraud had been re­port­ed. They were East­ern Caribbean Amal­ga­mat­ed Bank, An­tigua & Bar­bu­da In­vest­ment Bank, HS­BC and Caribbean Union Bank.

An Ob­serv­er sto­ry quot­ed Jes­sel Gads­by, gen­er­al man­ag­er of the St Kitts-based Caribbean Cred­it Card Cor­po­ra­tion, as say­ing: "I be­lieve it is near­ly all of the banks in the Caribbean, cer­tain­ly all of the banks in the East­ern Caribbean have been im­pact­ed by it."

In the Ba­hamas, An­wer Sun­der­ji, CEO of Fi­deli­ty Bank, was re­port­ed as say­ing: "All Ba­hami­an banks had their card da­ta com­pro­mised. This theft took place else­where and we were no­ti­fied by Visa on Fri­day."

Paul McWeeney, the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor at Bank of the Ba­hamas, said cred­it-card com­pa­nies and the Cen­tral Bank had called fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to warn them of the breach.His bank was re­plac­ing at least 2,000 cred­it cards and Com­mon­wealth Bank Ltd said it might have to reis­sue up to 5,000.

A Do­mini­can Web site pub­lished a state­ment is­sued by the Na­tion­al Bank of Do­mini­ca (NBD) to as­sure cus­tomers it was tak­ing steps to pre­vent their ac­counts from be­ing af­fect­ed by the se­cu­ri­ty breach.The state­ment said: "The breach af­fect­ed mul­ti­ple banks around the re­gion, in­clud­ing NBD. The in­for­ma­tion pro­vid­ed from our card proces­sor in­di­cat­ed a num­ber of our card­hold­ers were po­ten­tial­ly com­pro­mised as a re­sult of the breach. "In an ef­fort to pro­tect our cus­tomers from po­ten­tial fraud­u­lent at­tempts, we took im­me­di­ate ac­tion to block the af­fect­ed cards and reis­sue new cards."

The NBD said no cus­tomers had re­port­ed fraud­u­lent ac­tiv­i­ty in their ac­counts and the bank was not as­so­ci­at­ed with the com­pro­mised card-pro­cess­ing fa­cil­i­ty but was tak­ing pre­cau­tions and con­tact­ing all cus­tomers who were af­fect­ed.Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai, Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Jwala Ram­baran and the Bankers As­so­ci­a­tion could not be reached for com­ment yes­ter­day.