Above: Shiva Parasram.
Shiva Parasram is a cybersecurity expert who has been examining the dump of data exfiltrated from TSTT’s servers. When he spoke with me, he was coming to the end of 22 hours of examining the files, which were captured as unencrypted, plain text files in txt and csv formats. Images of customer documents and identification are in standard JPEG and PDF formats.
“I was talking to one of my friends who works at a pretty high position in the Big Four ( Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), KPMG, and PwC) about the implications with data privacy and the GDPR. If they have customer information (for anyone in the) EU at the moment or (someone) who falls under the EU GDPR, when the EU gets wind of this and they do their own investigations and analyse it, there could be fines for this. And those fines are nothing minimal”
Parasram wonders if TSTT still has the staff capabilities to mount a forensic analysis of what was taken. He’s been informed that after recent layoffs, TSTT may be operating with a skeleton staff for cybersecurity.
“We are trying to figure out if TSTT was actually aware of the full extent of the dump, if they actually took the dump to analyse it. One of my guys tried to open one of the Excel files. The file is so large that even with 64 gigs of RAM, it was taking forever.”
Parasram is a long way from reviewing all the data in the dump, but notes. I have seen information for many people that I know, accurate information, you know the the photos with IDs and stuff like that. Whether people pay with cash or Linx. But that’s from the client-side database.”
“But even on the company side, there’s a lot of internal stuff. There’s a password file called SYS_password.xls for example (with) names of systems and what appear to be passwords. It’s a lot of information. Everybody is exhausted, and we are probably just scratching the surface. It’s a big nightmare because honestly, if they were part of the EU, this could be billions of dollars in fines
Shiva Parasram
Shiva Parasram, is an Enterprise Risk Consultant, Senior Cybersecurity Lecturer and Forensic Investigator. He has written four books about digital forensics and leads the Computer Forensics and Security Institute.
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[…] Trinidad and Tobago – Shiva Parasram is a cybersecurity expert who has been examining the dump of data exfiltrated from TSTT’s servers. When he spoke with me, he was coming to the end of 22 hours of examining the files, which were captured as unencrypted, plain text files in txt and csv formats. Images of customer documents and identification are in standard JPEG and PDF formats… more […]