Jesse Ramdeo

As the dead­ly Rus­sia/Ukraine con­flict en­ters its sec­ond week, ex­perts are warn­ing of a less vis­i­ble yet for­mi­da­ble threat by in­vaders.

Po­ten­tial waves of cy­ber-at­tacks from Krem­lin hack­ers have been on the radar and al­ready sev­er­al coun­tries have tak­en steps to pre­vent any desta­bil­i­sa­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to se­nior strate­gic busi­ness and in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy ex­ec­u­tive Don­ny Ram­daths­ingh, cit­i­zens in T&T should be vig­i­lant.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia on Fri­day, Ram­daths­ingh not­ed that the on­slaught of at­tacks could lead to a wider dig­i­tal con­flict.

He said, “No­body knows how far it’s go­ing to es­ca­late. What we’ve seen so far is some soft­ware not known be­fore, so no­body will know for cer­tain how deep this goes. All we could do is look and keep up­dat­ed, have your back­ups and pre­pare.”

The CEO of Caribbean Tech Trendz Ltd warned of the dis­as­trous ef­fects of a cy­ber-at­tack.

“In very clear terms, a cy­ber-at­tack can crip­ple com­put­er sys­tems mean­ing that for ex­am­ple, a com­pa­ny may lose mon­ey be­cause their web­site is in­ac­ces­si­ble, or as we have seen on TV in last cou­ple days, the pub­lic sec­tor can be stopped from of­fer­ing es­sen­tial ser­vices,” he not­ed.

Dig­i­tal an­thro­pol­o­gist Daren Dho­ray ex­plained how cy­ber-at­tacks in Ukraine could spill over in­to oth­er ter­ri­to­ries.

He said, “The thing is, this mal­ware or bad soft­ware re­al­ly doesn’t care if you are from Ukraine or Trinidad or the US or Cana­da. It might be de­vel­oped to tar­get a par­tic­u­lar lo­ca­tion, but it’s not far to think that soft­ware can reach right here in Trinidad.”

Dho­ray said hack­ers could force sys­tems to crash with just one wrong click of a mouse.

“You could be down­load­ing mal­ware, you could be in­stalling ran­somware and those could lead to­wards wip­ing your en­tire ma­chine.”

Dho­ray, just like Ram­daths­ingh, has had his eyes fo­cused on the Rus­sia/Ukraine con­flict and emerg­ing cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty threats.

He said al­though there were sev­er­al ways for a cy­ber-at­tack to take place, one in par­tic­u­lar rais­es a main con­cern.

“Con­sid­er this—you can have cy­ber war­fare hap­pen­ing at dis­in­for­ma­tion lev­el so spread­ing pro­pa­gan­da, spread­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion and con­vinc­ing a group of in­di­vid­u­als to go against an­oth­er group and that’s all hap­pen­ing in the so­cial space and that can have far-reach­ing con­se­quences as it moves away from a dig­i­tal space to a phys­i­cal way,” he said,

If Rus­sia’s cy­ber­war­fare es­ca­lates, IOT in­fra­struc­ture en­gi­neer and own­er of Zeal Tech­nolo­gies Shane Lela says, there are steps peo­ple can take to pro­tect them­selves.

These in­clude keep­ing your an­ti-virus soft­ware up to date, choos­ing strong pass­words, us­ing on­ly trust­ed Wi-Fi re­sources and avoid giv­ing out your per­son­al in­for­ma­tion.

Lela al­so cau­tioned peo­ple about be­ing lured in­to ques­tion­able so­cial me­dia pop-ups or sites ask­ing for aid for Ukraine.

“Threats can arise from spoof­ing help and aid to Ukraine. Most of the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions are be­ing re­strict­ed for Rus­sia but Rus­sia can prob­a­bly seek aid from oth­er coun­tries pre­tend­ing to be Ukraine,” Lela said.

Sev­er­al lo­cal com­pa­nies are al­ready strength­en­ing their de­fences. The ANSA McAL group IT de­part­ment has ad­vised em­ploy­ees to be ex­tra vig­i­lant and cau­tious in deal­ing with cor­re­spon­dence, par­tic­u­lar­ly from ex­ter­nal sources.