Bernadette Lewis, Secretary General of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU), has urged regional governments to allocate adequate resources to the critical issue of cyber security.
Noting that governments find ways to finance “a lot of things that are here today and gone tomorrow,” she said they must now have the political will to do what was necessary rather than what was expedient since technological advancements allowed crime to be trans-border.
“You can have someone perpetrating a crime in Timbuktu, Australia or India and the execution is happening in the Caribbean. We need to appreciate that cyber security issues are borderless,” she said.
Lewis was speaking during a Press conference at the Crane Resort and Residences prior to the 9th Caribbean Ministerial Strategic Seminar hosted by the CTU in association with the Inter-American Committee against Terrorism (CICTE).
She noted that while there were mechanisms by which governments could receive international assistance and support in implementing cyber security measures they still had to do their part for national development.
Business development and operations manager Rodney Taylor noted that sometimes the quality of implementation is more critical than how much a company spends.
“We’ve seen that the technology allows our member states, even the least developed, to do a lot more by investing less . . . by implementing systems intelligently in a strategic way,” he said.
Meanwhile, CICTE programme manager Brian Sullivan stressed that cyber security issues are “more pressing than some people recognize” since the Caribbean had one of the fastest rates of growth in Internet usage per capita in the world.
He said also that the Caribbean was becoming increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats from within and outside the region.
“Quite often incidents that we’re seeing affecting government networks, for example, originate outside of our region as a whole and have connections in multiple countries in other parts of the world,” he said.