An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@

guardian.co.tt

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce (TTCIC) has moved to clar­i­fy re­ports sur­round­ing a hack­ing in­ci­dent that oc­curred dur­ing one of its on­line events yes­ter­day. The Cham­ber con­firmed that the breach oc­curred on its Zoom plat­form dur­ing a we­bi­nar ses­sion yes­ter­day, but em­pha­sised that the mat­ter was swift­ly con­tained and did not com­pro­mise its wider sys­tems.

TTCIC pres­i­dent Son­ji Pierre ex­plained that the in­tru­sion hap­pened dur­ing the Cham­ber’s on­go­ing we­bi­nar se­ries, which brings to­geth­er mem­bers of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty for crit­i­cal dis­cus­sions.

“The meet­ing was in­ter­rupt­ed by a ma­li­cious, unau­tho­rized ac­tor who briefly dis­played of­fen­sive con­tent,” Pierre said.

She in­di­cat­ed that the Cham­ber im­me­di­ate­ly abort­ed the ses­sion to pre­vent fur­ther dis­rup­tion.

The in­ci­dent, com­mon­ly re­ferred to as “zoom­bomb­ing,” has been re­port­ed in oth­er ju­ris­dic­tions as on­line meet­ings and vir­tu­al con­fer­ences have grown in pop­u­lar­i­ty.

Pierre as­sured mem­bers and the pub­lic that the Cham­ber’s IT sys­tems, as well as its so­cial me­dia plat­forms, were not breached or af­fect­ed in any way.

“This was an iso­lat­ed in­ci­dent lim­it­ed to the Zoom ses­sion it­self,” she stressed.