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Tuesday, February 18, 2025

TSTT to submit report on 2023 cyber breach today

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25 days ago
20250123
TSTT headquarters on Independence Square in Portof-Spain.

TSTT headquarters on Independence Square in Portof-Spain.

Roberto Codallo

The Board of Di­rec­tors of Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go Lim­it­ed (TSTT) will sub­mit the fi­nal re­port of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the 2023 cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty breach and the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the in­ci­dent to the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties, Mar­vin Gon­za­les, to­day.

The board says it re­ceived the fi­nal re­port on Tues­day. The min­is­ter will re­view the re­port.

The cy­ber­breach went as far up as af­fect­ing the Prime Min­is­ter’s pri­vate de­tails.

The cy­ber­at­tack on TSTT took place on Oc­to­ber 9, 2023 but was on­ly dis­closed on Oc­to­ber 27, 2023. This af­ter Fal­con Feeds, an In­dia-based tech­nol­o­gy se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­ny, re­vealed on X that TSTT was in­clud­ed on the vic­tim list of the ran­somware group, Ran­somExx.

The Min­is­ter ini­tial­ly de­nied that any breach had oc­curred, dub­bing it “not true” in me­dia re­ports on Oc­to­ber 30, 2023. How­ev­er, over the course of a few days, cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty ex­perts did a deep dive in­to the da­ta pub­lished on the dark web and made it pub­lic. On No­vem­ber 5, 2023, Gon­za­les then ad­mit­ted that TSTT was the tar­get of a mal­ware “in­cur­sion” on March 13, 2024 and or­dered an in­de­pen­dent in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

TSTT it­self con­firmed that six gi­ga­bytes or less than one per­cent of its petabytes of da­ta was ac­cessed. The com­pa­ny al­so en­gaged the lo­cal in­de­pen­dent firm Cy­ber­Eye to con­duct root cause and log analy­sis, as­sess TSTT’s cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty con­trols, and ad­dress in­ter­nal is­sues re­lat­ed to threat mon­i­tor­ing and de­tec­tion.

The mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion over whether the breach oc­curred led to the sack­ing of then chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Lisa Agard, as an­nounced by TSTT on No­vem­ber 15. Two months lat­er, on Jan­u­ary 4, TSTT re­vealed that chief fi­nan­cial of­fi­cer Shi­va Ram­nar­ine was axed. TSTT’s se­nior man­ag­er of Cor­po­rate, En­vi­ron­men­tal, So­cial and Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment, Khamal Georges, re­signed from the com­pa­ny on June 6, be­com­ing the third high pro­file ex­it in the wake of the in­ci­dent. How­ev­er, re­ports stat­ed that Georges left for bet­ter em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties.

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