CEO of the Telecommunications Services of T&T (TSTT) Lisa Agard and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Shiva Ramnarine must be fired ahead of an investigation launched into the data breach at the company.
The call has been made by Communications Workers’ Union (CWU) secretary-general Clyde Elder.
Elder is urging Public Utilities Minister Marvin Gonzales to fire the two executives after he (Gonzales) ordered that an independent inquiry be conducted into the matter.
The cyber attack caused 6GB of TSTT’s data including 1.2 million names to be uploaded over 13,000 times from the dark web.
Elder, according to a GML report, alleged that the two top executives will hinder the investigation.
He told the media house: “Remove them from office, because they will interfere with the investigation if they are there because if there is anything that comes back to them or points back to them, they will try their best to get rid of it.
“Investigations in this country does take forever and a day, so are we as citizens prepared to say let’s wait until the investigation finish? I am certainly not prepared to wait as the secretary general of CWU. I’m not prepared to wait until that investigation finish at all. Yes investigate, no problem,” Elder said.
He said the fact that the Prime Minister’s information was leaked as a result of the cyberattack is cause for concern.
“If the second highest office in the land, that person’s personal information is compromised then that will be enough for this Government to act. If it was just you and me alone, they wouldn’t do nothing about it. But I’m glad that a big boy so to speak, the Prime Minister no less, that his information was also compromised so that some heads will roll,” he added.
Elder added that not only did the company lose millions of dollars in revenue when it was breached, but the company is also losing staff as a result.
Elder alleged that three to four Information Technology (IT) employees resigned following the breach because they feared being blamed.
He claimed employees warned management that an attack was forthcoming but was ignored because the company refused to spend money on security.
“TSTT was hacked via a certain medium. They did nothing to protect that area they were hacked, and they were hacked again. And that is why the employees are saying when they were hacked the first time, ‘We need to do X, Y, Z. One, two, three’. And when the company didn’t listen to them and they were hacked again, they knew that the next thing that was going to happen, they were going to come down on them because they looking for a scapegoat and the scapegoat can’t be Lisa Agard and Shiva Ramnarine who refused to pay for the cyber security services to protect the equipment and the network,” he alleged.