KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

Cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty laws are a mat­ter of ur­gency for the Gov­ern­ment.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley gave this as­sur­ance yes­ter­day as he re­vealed that At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Regi­nald Ar­mour and Min­is­ter of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion Has­sel Bac­chus were work­ing swift­ly to bring be­fore the Cab­i­net, laws that will de­ter crim­i­nal el­e­ments from com­mit­ting cy­ber­at­tacks.

Dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann's, yes­ter­day, Row­ley ad­mit­ted that the Gov­ern­ment needs to up­date and put new leg­is­la­tion in place to treat this is­sue.

His re­sponse came a lit­tle over a month af­ter his per­son­al in­for­ma­tion was part of a list of 1.2 mil­lion names leaked to the dark web fol­low­ing a cy­ber­at­tack on the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT).

Row­ley said, “We cer­tain­ly need to strength­en our leg­isla­tive frame­work. But now es­pe­cial­ly as we be­come more and more de­pen­dent on the dig­i­tal age of­fer­ings, it is a mat­ter of ur­gency for us to re­turn to pri­ori­tis­ing the leg­is­la­tion that will deal with the en­vi­ron­ment of 'cy­ber­mat­ics', if you will call it that. So that cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty and a whole new suite of crim­i­nal of­fences need to be iden­ti­fied and cod­i­fied and I ex­pect that the Min­is­ter of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion and the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al will get that be­fore the Cab­i­net as quick­ly as we can to en­sure that we do have the de­ter­rent. So yes, we need to have new, and where it ex­ists, up­dat­ed leg­is­la­tion to al­low us to live com­fort­ably in the dig­i­tal age.”

How­ev­er, he added in the event there are more cy­ber­at­tacks, the State needs to be able to com­pe­tent­ly deal with it in such a way that the loss of con­fi­dence is min­imised.

In re­sponse to his per­son­al in­for­ma­tion be­ing leaked, Row­ley said he was ad­vised that it was on­ly his iden­ti­fi­ca­tion card num­ber and his TSTT phone bill which is at­tached to his gov­ern­ment phone.

He said he was very con­cerned that it may have al­so been his bank­ing in­for­ma­tion, but that was not the case.

He said in­for­ma­tion about an­oth­er mem­ber of his fam­i­ly was al­so leaked.

On Oc­to­ber 9, TSTT re­ceived a ma­jor blow from in­ter­na­tion­al hack­ers Ram­somexx re­sult­ing in 6GB of its da­ta in­clud­ing cus­tomers’ names, na­tion­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­bers, phone num­bers and ad­dress­es stolen and leaked.

Al­most six weeks lat­er, Lisa Agard was re­placed by Kent West­ern as TSTT’s Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO).

51 per cent of TSTT is owned by the State.

Asked if he was con­sult­ed about Agard’s dis­missal, Row­ley said "no."

Asked if he was in­formed be­fore it hap­pened, he said, “I knew that there were at­tempts made to en­sure that there was ac­count­abil­i­ty and that the Gov­ern­ment would get a clear and ac­cu­rate re­port from the com­pa­ny as to what ac­tu­al­ly hap­pened, that much I knew.”

In ad­di­tion to TSTT, the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and Min­istry of Le­gal Af­fairs (AGLA), PriceS­mart and Courts were all vic­tims of cy­ber­at­tacks in re­cent months.