The T&T Postal Cor­po­ra­tion (TTPost) has been urged to take steps to pro­tect its client data­base from hack­ers.

Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Mar­vin Gon­za­les is­sued the warn­ing yes­ter­day as he com­mis­sioned the Records Man­age­ment Fa­cil­i­ty and of­fi­cial­ly re­opened the Tacarigua Post Of­fice, East­ern Main Road, Dins­ley, af­ter a four-year clo­sure.

Gon­za­les agreed that while the cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal land­scape dic­tat­ed the need for in­creased dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, it al­so brought with it a greater risk of cy­ber crim­i­nals seek­ing to ac­cess cus­tomers’ con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion as they seek to prof­it.

Re­fer­ring to the cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty breach at TSTT, Courts and PriceS­mart in re­cent days, the min­is­ter took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to, “Re­mind the lead­er­ship of TTPost...ob­serve what is tak­ing place on the dig­i­tal land­scape and en­sure that your sys­tems are hard­ened and ro­bust enough that as you move in­to the dig­i­tal age, that you no longer will have a TSTT and a Courts and an ANSA McAL...all of these re­cent oc­cur­rences of hack­ing tak­ing place.”

Ad­mit­ting TTPost had fall­en vic­tim to hack­ers not too long ago, Gon­za­les as­sured it had been man­aged in such a way that cus­tomers and their da­ta were not com­pro­mised.

“That is now a liv­ing re­al­i­ty,” he said, adding, “Even if you de­ploy the best sys­tems, there will al­ways be at­tempts by cy­ber-crim­i­nals to get in­to your data­base and to make mon­ey by this crim­i­nal en­ter­prise.”

He again ap­pealed to of­fi­cials to do what they had to, to pro­tect the pri­vate da­ta of cus­tomers as they ex­pand­ed their dig­i­tal foot­print.

Mean­while, more than 30,000 peo­ple will ben­e­fit from the re­sump­tion of ser­vice at the Tacarigua lo­ca­tion and as TTPost moves in­to digi­tis­ing its records, Gon­za­les said he was hap­py that it would re­duce the de­pen­den­cy on pa­per and al­low for new dig­i­tal ser­vices for cus­tomers.

He said the num­ber of peo­ple who now re­ly on let­ters and com­mu­ni­ca­tion via the tra­di­tion­al form of postal de­liv­ery was, “Dwin­dling and dwin­dling fast.”

The re­fur­bish­ment project, which was fund­ed un­der the Pub­lic Sec­tor In­vest­ment Pro­gramme (PSIP) for $1.4 mil­lion, was com­plet­ed on time and un­der bud­get.

Re­veal­ing what oth­er projects are on the draw­ing board for fis­cal 2023/2024, Gon­za­les said pri­or­i­ty fo­cus had been placed on the full re­fur­bish­ment of icon­ic post of­fices in San­gre Grande, Curepe and Ma­yaro.