Ad­dress­ing an an­a­lyst brief­ing yes­ter­day, a se­nior ex­ec­u­tive of a lo­cal com­pa­ny de­scribed cy­ber hack­ing as an "un­for­tu­nate re­al­i­ty" for busi­ness­es any­where in the world.

The ex­ec­u­tive posed the "un­for­tu­nate re­al­i­ty" of cy­ber hack­ing in the con­text of the evo­lu­tion of busi­ness from the phys­i­cal space to the dig­i­tal space, and al­so con­sumers' de­sire and need to in­ter­act dig­i­tal­ly.

The ex­ec­u­tive then out­lined the "ma­te­r­i­al" in­vest­ment the group has made in the three years since it was sub­ject­ed to a cy­ber­at­tack.

Sev­er­al en­ti­ties in T&T have ac­knowl­edged that they suf­fered the "un­for­tu­nate re­al­i­ty" of be­ing hacked. Among these are the ANSA McAL Group, the Massy Group, Bea­con In­sur­ance, the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and the South-West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA).

And just last week, the Amer­i­can aero­space gi­ant, Boe­ing, and the In­dus­tri­al and Com­mer­cial Bank of Chi­na, one of the largest banks in the world, were hacked.

In none of these cas­es, some of which are on­go­ing, did the boards of these en­ti­ties or the Cab­i­net of this coun­try, in the case of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and the SWRHA, em­bark on the dras­tic step of ter­mi­nat­ing the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, with­out even ac­knowl­edg­ing her ser­vice, as the board of ma­jor­i­ty state-owned Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT) did on Tues­day.

Giv­en the rar­i­ty of CEOs be­ing dis­missed for hack­ing in­ci­dents, it be­hooves the board of TSTT to pro­vide full dis­clo­sure of the facts sur­round­ing the dis­missal of its for­mer CEO Lisa Agard to the T&T pop­u­la­tion.

An ex­pla­na­tion from the TSTT board would stop the spec­u­la­tion that has abound­ed, most of which has cen­tred on the com­mu­ni­ca­tion by the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny to its var­i­ous publics.

At a vir­tu­al meet­ing of TSTT's bond­hold­ers and an­a­lysts last Fri­day, Ms Agard apol­o­gised to its stake­hold­ers for its com­mu­ni­ca­tion of the breach to them.

"We were so busi­ly fo­cused on iden­ti­fy­ing the prob­lem, con­tain­ing it and restor­ing full ca­pa­bil­i­ty to serve our cus­tomers that we ne­glect­ed, per­haps, to com­mu­ni­cate ef­fec­tive­ly with them," Agard said.

It is clear that the TSTT board did not feel the apol­o­gy was enough to re­dress what it may have per­ceived as a stain on the trust the pub­lic has in the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny. If that is so, the com­pa­ny should come out and say so.

But it is clear that the TSTT ex­ec­u­tive man­age­ment erred in not alert­ing the pub­lic about the da­ta breach be­fore it was dis­closed by a lo­cal jour­nal­ist.

And it is al­so clear the com­pa­ny at­tempt­ed to down­play the im­pact of the da­ta breach on the pop­u­la­tion.

There were al­so is­sues in the state­ments made by Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Mar­vin Gon­za­les in Par­lia­ment, and in news re­leas­es that were tar­get­ted for con­sump­tion by the pub­lic.

Mr Gon­za­les may feel that he was mis­led and em­bar­rased by the ex­ec­u­tive man­age­ment of TSTT and this may have been the cause of Ms Agard's fall.

But the pub­lic does not know and it should, giv­en the fact that TSTT is 51 per cent owned by Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd on be­half of the peo­ple of this coun­try.