CEO of TSTT, Lisa Agard, this morn­ing apol­o­gised to the cus­tomers of the ma­jor­i­ty state-owned telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider whose da­ta was stolen by cy­ber crim­i­nals in last month's breach of its data­bas­es.

Re­spond­ing this morn­ing to ques­tions at a vir­tu­al brief­ing with the com­pa­ny's bond­hold­ers and an­a­lysts, Agard ad­mit­ted that TSTT could have done bet­ter in com­mu­ni­cat­ing last month's cy­ber breach to its stake­hold­ers.

Agard said in its haste to ad­dress the cy­ber prob­lem, there were some things the com­pa­ny could have done bet­ter.

"We were so busi­ly fo­cused on iden­ti­fy­ing the prob­lem, con­tain­ing it and restor­ing full ca­pa­bil­i­ty to serve our cus­tomers that we ne­glect­ed, per­haps, to com­mu­ni­cate ef­fec­tive­ly with them," said Agard.

"This was not done with mal­ice, but rather from a place of en­sur­ing that the most ac­cu­rate in­for­ma­tion was com­mu­ni­cat­ed at the time it be­came known," she added.

She said ini­tial­ly most of the cus­tomer com­plaints were about con­nec­tiv­i­ty and the in­abil­i­ty to pay bills on­line and the man­age­ment of queries. The telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions ex­ec­u­tive said the com­pa­ny fo­cused its ef­forts on ad­dress­ing these is­sues, with its teams work­ing around the clock to get cus­tomers se­cure­ly back on line.

"In hind­sight, we should have al­so en­sured that we kept our val­ued cus­tomers bet­ter in­formed and ed­u­cat­ed about this sit­u­a­tion.

Giv­ing a time­line of TSTT's re­sponse, Agard said that as soon as the da­ta breach was pub­li­cised on Oc­to­ber 28, the com­pa­ny launched an in­ves­ti­ga­tion to ver­i­fy the claims, and cor­rob­o­rate the in­for­ma­tion, that was in the pub­lic.

"Check­ing the da­ta against TSTTs many data­bas­es was an ex­ten­sive process and this guid­ed us in terms of the in­for­ma­tion that we com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the pub­lic and to our oth­er stake­hold­ers," said the TSTT CEO.