Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Reginald Armour says judicial administrators must stay sensitive and alert to the threat of cyberattacks.
He made the call while addressing the Conference of Chief Justices and Heads of Judiciary of the Caribbean at the Hall of Justice, Port-of-Spain, on Wednesday evening, as he noted experts recovered 90 per cent of the data compromised in last July’s cyberattack on the Ministry of the Attorney General and Legal Affairs (AGLA).
“This has brought to the forefront of our consideration the need for enhanced and improved cybersecurity measures. The increasing complexity of cyber criminals has signalled the need for proactive and evolved responses by our cyber professionals, as what we are witnessing is effectively a cybersecurity arms race,” Armour said.
Recalling the AGLA’s forced shutdown of internal network operations due to the cyber breach, Armour said this included emails, file access and online connectivity. It impacted several departments within AGLA, including the Chief State Solicitor’s Office, the Solicitor General’s Department, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and other administrative functions, he revealed.
“This cyber breach not only disrupted internal workflows and productivity but also posed a significant challenge to our capacity to maintain uninterrupted public service delivery,” he said.
Armour said a team of international and local experts gathered to address the breach, including members of the Ministry of Digital Transformation and specialised agencies from the Ministry of National Security, the Inter-American Development Bank’s cybersecurity team, Precision Cyber-Technologies and MBC.
He said they executed a structured and phased response, including detection and identification, containment and mitigation, isolation of affected systems, quarantine and segmentation, re-imaging and hardening, patching and vulnerability remediation, credential resets and endpoint restoration.
Armour said the AGLA had since reinforced all cybersecurity systems to prevent future breaches.
He noted that the Judiciary, prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, had engaged the local criminal justice sectors in transitioning from the traditional in-person paper-based system to virtual and electronic platforms. He said this extended to the Judiciary using a case line software in the Criminal Division that allows for digitalised evidence management and case presentation. He said it revolutionised how prosecuting and defence councils prepare and present cases and the court receives evidence.
Armour told those gathered that Government plans to collaborate with the Judiciary to complete this transformation with the proclamation of the Administration of Justice (Indictable Proceedings) Act to abolish preliminary enquiries and introduce a document-based pre-trial assessment. Under this new system, Government envisaged the obligatory use of a case line system.
However, as more State organisations move towards interconnected digital systems and data repositories, Armour said there were cybersecurity threats that could expose sensitive data and protected information.
Noting cyberattacks on public and private institutions in recent months meanwhile, Chief Justice Ivor Archie said the Judiciary cannot afford to become complacent after fending off a similar attack.
Archie said some of the same cyber criminals targeted the Judiciary around the same time. He said the Judiciary’s hypervigilance allowed it to detect and contain the intrusion at the point of the attempt to penetrate the system.
“We cannot just pat ourselves on the back and be complacent. It is a new reality, and hackers are always adapting, so must we. Judiciaries hold extremely sensitive information about and belonging to customers, litigants and even jurors,” Archie said.
He asked what was best practice and the appropriate levels of encryption, saying these were among the questions to consider for research as there is an urgent need for solutions.
Last July, the Judiciary suffered a shutdown of its email and calendar system, forcing a temporary postponement of hearings. However, Archie did not link the cyberattack to this event.
PriceSmart, Massy Stores, Courts, the South-West Regional Health Authority and the Telecommunications Services of T&T are among institutions that have fallen prey to cyber attackers in recent months.
With the conference running until tomorrow, Archie said the participants will explore practical ways to improve the Latimer House Guidelines to work for the remainder of 2023 and beyond.