On­ly a few weeks ago, Trinidad and To­ba­go was con­sumed with fear over pos­si­ble iden­ti­ty theft, fraud, ex­tor­tion and oth­er types of ne­far­i­ous ac­tiv­i­ty, af­ter it was learnt that the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT) had been the vic­tim of a mas­sive cy­ber­at­tack.

Af­ter all, the en­ti­ty which claimed re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, Ran­somExx, is pur­port­ed to be one of some re­pute. Added to this was the fact that it dumped the stolen 6GB of TSTT da­ta, which con­tained a re­port­ed 1.2 mil­lion en­tries, on the dark web, where it could be fur­ther ac­cessed by in­di­vid­u­als with a propen­si­ty for ac­tiv­i­ty of a deep­er crim­i­nal na­ture.

The fall­out from the in­ci­dent was, need­less to say, mas­sive, with Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, who had some per­son­al in­for­ma­tion leaked in the breach, la­belling it a na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty con­cern.

For­mer CEO Lisa Agard, af­ter a be­lat­ed pub­lic apol­o­gy, ul­ti­mate­ly lost her job for the man­ner in which the com­pa­ny mis­han­dled the in­ci­dent.

In the ear­ly stages of the fi­as­co, Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Mar­vin Gon­za­les, un­der whose purview the state-owned com­pa­ny re­sides, promised to en­sure prop­er sup­port would be pro­vid­ed for TSTT to probe how the hack­ers so eas­i­ly ac­cessed the coun­try’s main tele­coms provider’s sys­tem. In fact, at the time, he bandied the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS), a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee of Par­lia­ment or a foren­sic probe as op­tions for the analy­sis of how TSTT was so eas­i­ly opened to such an at­tack.

It is, there­fore, quite dis­con­cert­ing that Min­is­ter Gon­za­les is now telling cit­i­zens that the sub­stan­tial ex­ter­nal probe in­to the Oc­to­ber 9 in­ci­dent is not on­ly yet to get off the ground, but that the com­pa­ny tasked to do so will not be on board be­fore two to three weeks, and that com­ple­tion of this ma­jor probe is al­so an­oth­er few months off.

Fur­ther­more, the fact that TSTT it­self is still un­der­tak­ing its in­ter­nal probe of the in­ci­dent over a month lat­er, even with as­sis­tance from a for­eign team, sug­gests a lack of ur­gency in get­ting to the bot­tom of the mat­ter.

In­deed, with the Christ­mas sea­son now up­on us, and the propen­si­ty of state agen­cies to slow down op­er­a­tions dur­ing the end of the year, to be fol­lowed by the Car­ni­val sea­son, cit­i­zens could be ex­cused if they feel this mat­ter will not be dis­pensed with be­fore the mid­dle of next year.

And so, this news­pa­per asks the crit­i­cal ques­tion now of whether TSTT and the Min­is­ter are ful­ly com­mit­ted to ac­count­ing to the pub­lic for this sor­did af­fair.

At a time when con­ver­sa­tions abound about ex­pen­di­ture in­to com­mis­sions of en­quiries while not ben­e­fit­ting ful­ly from such ac­tiv­i­ties, we urge Min­is­ter Gon­za­les to get TSTT to fast track this ac­tiv­i­ty.

Let’s not for­get, af­ter all, that the cy­ber­at­tack­ers work 24/7 look­ing for new and lu­cra­tive tar­gets. Now that TSTT has proven to be a soft tar­get for them, they will turn their at­ten­tion to oth­er lo­cal en­ti­ties, where, of course, they have al­ready had some suc­cess in the past.

With un­cer­tain­ty re­gard­ing the pri­va­cy of the cus­tomers af­fect­ed in the at­tack still an is­sue, we call on Min­is­ter Gon­za­les to light a hot­ter fire un­der new in­ter­im TSTT CEO Kent West­ern in this mat­ter. Too much is at stake giv­en TSTT’s dom­i­nance of the tele­coms land­scape.