The justice ministry in Trinidad and Tobago is coping with a hack that has disrupted operations.
The island nation of more than 1.4 million inhabitants said on Friday that its Ministry of Digital Transformation had uncovered a recent cyberattack targeting the country’s Attorney General’s Office and Ministry of Legal Affairs (AGLA).
Although no particular date was given for when the attack began, AGLA issued a message stating that it has been dealing with outages since June 30 and that internal services have been affected. After that date, any court documents served electronically were not received.
“This unauthorized and illegal access has negatively impacted operations at the AGLA and certain associated Divisions,” the Ministry of Digital Transformation stated on Friday.
“After taking steps to mitigate the threat, an investigation is underway in collaboration with leading industry cybersecurity experts.” In the interim, several normally provided services are temporarily unavailable.”
The ministry supplied alternative email addresses for people to transmit court paperwork and stated that in-person court services were still available in Port of Spain’s capital.
AGLA did not answer to inquiries regarding whether services would be operational this week.
According to Renuka Sagramsingh-Sooklal, an official at AGLA, Director of IT Roger Sealy “has been working nonstop around the clock with his IT team and other stakeholders to rectify this issue.”
Other local news outlets reported that government lawyers were unable to access their email accounts or essential documents for impending cases.
On Friday, the Trinidad and Tobago Cyber Security Incident Response Team (TT-CSIRT) issued a warning to all enterprises to “take the necessary precautions to mitigate against rising ransomware attacks in Trinidad and Tobago.”
The organization advised businesses and victims to contact them for incident response support, and also supplied multiple email addresses and links to ransomware manuals. They further stated that any information supplied to the agency is secret and will not be made public.
