Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence Do­minic Smith says cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty is more than just a tech­ni­cal ne­ces­si­ty, but a core pil­lar of pub­lic trust and good gov­er­nance, es­pe­cial­ly as Gov­ern­ment moves to­ward a dig­i­tal-first ap­proach. 

“I don’t want us to leave here think­ing that this is just busi­ness as usu­al. It is not; it is a mile­stone from our Gov­ern­ment and is part of our foun­da­tion­al agen­da.

“We’re try­ing to build a mod­ern, ef­fi­cient, trust­ed pub­lic ser­vice for the fu­ture world,” he said. 

He was speak­ing at the in­au­gur­al Na­tion­al Cy­ber­Drill, which was held at the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T’s Ch­aguara­mas cam­pus (UTT) yes­ter­day and host­ed by iGovTT on be­half of the Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence.

Smith said as the Gov­ern­ment ac­cel­er­at­ed its ap­proach to dig­i­tal gov­er­nance, cit­i­zens must be able to trust the it, its poli­cies, and the mech­a­nisms put in place to pro­tect them. 

“Cit­i­zens now are right­ful­ly ex­pect­ing seam­less dig­i­tal-first ex­pe­ri­ences from their Gov­ern­ment, and they have a right to de­mand that,” he said. 

How­ev­er, he told the 80 par­tic­i­pants from the pub­lic ser­vice, pri­vate sec­tor, and var­i­ous uni­ver­si­ties that with every new on­line ser­vice that was launched, the Gov­ern­ment en­tered in­to a new di­men­sion of the so­cial con­tract with cit­i­zens. 

“We are ask­ing cit­i­zens to place their sen­si­tive, per­son­al and com­mer­cial da­ta in­to our cus­tody. We are ask­ing them to give us the ben­e­fit of the doubt, we are ask­ing them to give us that trust,” he said. 

Draw­ing on his own ex­pe­ri­ences, the min­is­ter ex­plained that stud­ies showed a di­rect cor­re­la­tion: when cit­i­zens trust the se­cu­ri­ty of dig­i­tal gov­ern­ment plat­forms, they are far more like­ly to use them. He said be­fore pub­lic ser­vice, he too at­tempt­ed to use gov­ern­ment web­sites but was un­suc­cess­ful. 

“We are par­tak­ers of na­tion­al ser­vices ... I want­ed the Gov­ern­ment to work; I want­ed to be a ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the ser­vices the Gov­ern­ment pro­vides,” he said.

Par­tic­i­pants will take part in a live OS­INT Chal­lenge to test their open-source in­tel­li­gence skills through hands-on sce­nar­ios; a cy­ber cri­sis sim­u­la­tion, where teams will re­spond to a fic­tion­al cy­ber in­ci­dent in re­al time; and ex­pert-led train­ing ses­sions de­liv­ered by Crowd­Strike, one of the world’s lead­ing cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty firms.

The event will con­clude with a pan­el dis­cus­sion on cy­ber­bul­ly­ing, fea­tur­ing dis­tin­guished speak­ers and ad­vo­cates ad­dress­ing the hu­man side of cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty.

In Oc­to­ber 2023, in­ter­na­tion­al hack­ers Ran­somEXX an­nounced that they in­fect­ed the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go with ran­somware and stole as many as six gi­ga­bytes of its da­ta. The in­for­ma­tion for over one mil­lion cus­tomers was dumped on the dark web.