The da­ta breach that the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T is now strug­gling to con­trol has brought the is­sue of trust and ef­fec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the fore­front.

Re­gain­ing pub­lic con­fi­dence is not go­ing to be easy, con­sid­er­ing that TSTT’s first re­sponse to this mat­ter was to down­play the grav­i­ty of it, which has on­ly com­pound­ed the dam­age to pub­lic con­fi­dence that this breach has caused.

Few need to be told that, among many things, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions providers are con­duits and repos­i­to­ries of crit­i­cal and sa­cred pub­lic in­for­ma­tion as a re­sult of the mil­lions of con­ver­sa­tions, mes­sages, per­son­al da­ta and con­fi­den­tial files that they fa­cil­i­tate on their net­works dai­ly.

Cus­tomers re­ly on them to keep this in­for­ma­tion safe, and in cas­es when things go wrong, the very least that should be done is to be as open as pos­si­ble while giv­ing prop­er as­sur­ances of the mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors and the ac­tions to be tak­en to min­imise the im­pact on them.

Whether TSTT knew how bad the sit­u­a­tion re­al­ly was when it first re­spond­ed to the breach through a me­dia re­lease is un­clear.

What’s trans­par­ent, how­ev­er, is that the com­pa­ny took the de­fen­sive route in its com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the pub­lic in a news re­lease, point­ing first­ly to the strength of its IT sys­tem, be­fore go­ing on to say no da­ta was delet­ed from its data­bas­es or ma­nip­u­lat­ed in what it re­ferred to as an “at­tempt­ed breach”.

Fur­ther as­sur­ances came from Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Mar­vin Gon­za­les, who told the Par­lia­ment that cit­i­zens’ da­ta were not com­pro­mised.

This ap­proach was to nul­li­fy all fears in the pub­lic do­main that any­thing un­to­ward had oc­curred and to paint an im­age of TSTT hav­ing the sit­u­a­tion en­tire­ly un­der con­trol.

In short, the pub­lic was be­ing told there was no need to wor­ry.

Of course, we now know that noth­ing was fur­ther from the truth, and both TSTT and the min­is­ter have been forced over the last few days to back­track on their ini­tial stance by of­fer­ing apolo­gies to the pub­lic and seek­ing to es­tab­lish an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to how hack­ers were able to breach their sys­tem.

For the cus­tomers, the horse has al­ready bolt­ed, as the in­for­ma­tion that is on the dark web can­not be re­trieved, and thou­sands are now be­ing asked to adopt mea­sures to safe­guard their se­cu­ri­ty fur­ther, while the coun­try waits to find out what re­al­ly hap­pened.

With trust be­ing a sig­nif­i­cant el­e­ment re­spon­si­ble for achiev­ing a com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage, TSTT stands to lose ground in the mar­ket the longer cus­tomers are left scep­ti­cal, over­shad­owed by a cloud of un­cer­tain­ty as to where the truth re­al­ly lies.

Giv­en that the Gov­ern­ment owns 51 per cent of the com­pa­ny through the Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Lim­it­ed, this is the peo­ple’s busi­ness, re­gard­less of whether they are TSTT cus­tomers or not.

The mea­sures re­quired now to set this right are two-fold. TSTT must mit­i­gate the dam­age while em­ploy­ing the cor­rect re­sources need­ed to safe­guard its sys­tems, and sec­ond­ly, it must al­so con­sid­er what now needs to be done to re­store pub­lic trust.

It can best start do­ing so by trans­par­ent and clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion go­ing for­ward.