A major cyberattack on the quiet Boxing Day holiday forced the National Insurance Board of T&T (NIBTT) to close all its offices around the country for the rest of the week. In fact, it said it would be resuming operations on a phased basis in January 2024 and stopped short of giving a definitive date.
Yesterday, the NIB said it was engaging the services of both local and international cybersecurity experts to “spearhead the discovery and assessment to mitigate risk.”
The NIBTT, which pays benefits to hundreds of thousands of employees in both the public and private sectors, is in possession of critical information, including personal details of citizens, their banking information and details of their entire employment history.
In its first statement issued yesterday, the NIBTT revealed the ransomware attack.
“The public is advised that all offices of the National Insurance Board of T&T (NIBTT) will be closed from Wednesday 27th to Friday 29th December 2023.
“The company is currently assessing our systems after having experienced a ransomware attack on Tuesday 26th December 2023.”
It added, “All steps are being taken to protect our data integrity and technology hardware. We are also continuing to diligently work with our external technology partners to expeditiously resolve this matter.”
In its second statement, NIBTT sought to assure customers that while its offices will remain closed until Friday (December 29), the closure would not hamper its service.
It said, “All scheduled commitments have been completed for December 2023 and anticipates that all future commitments for January 2024 will be honoured. “Customers with confirmed appointments during the three-day temporary closure will be facilitated with a new appointment during January 2024.”
The NIBTT said the cyberattack was reported to the T&T Cyber Security Incident Response Team (TT-CSIRT) under the Ministry of National Security, and it was “working with this team toward a resolution.”
Meanwhile, Minister of National Security Fitzgerald Hinds said yesterday that cybercrimes will increase given the widespread use of digitisation and ICT platforms and assured that measures are being put in place to stem the wave of attacks.
“What is to be done is that systems are put in place to protect yourselves against this. Overseeing the Government’s efforts and also making, taking reports investigating and making recommendations for our improved protection in Trinidad and Tobago against cybercrimes, that process is on the way,” he said on I95FM.
“In the meantime, there has been some hacks and some interventions in different institutions, these are reported to the TT-CSIRT and they would investigate working along with the entity and they would come up in ways in which these things could be prevented in the future.”
Only last week, Attorney General Reginald Armour told the Senate that new laws to deal with cybercrimes will be coming to Parliament soon.
The attention to cyberattacks came after the recent attack on Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT) in October, which saw data for millions of customers being dumped on the dark web.
Uptick in attacks
Cybersecurity expert Rishi Maharaj said in the last six months there was an uptick in attacks in Trinidad, both in private and public sector organisations.
“These types of organisations have a lot of personal information such as identification numbers, addresses, financial information that can be used in fraudulent activities, clone identities and it has harmful effects on citizens,” he explained.
He said it’s time for the Government to take action.
“From a cybercrime perspective it needs to literally enhance the laws because the laws we have now are very old and you have to take into consideration the new attacks we have now like phishing, ransomware attacks, external hackers outside of T&T. We need to regulate,” Maharaj said.