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FOR JUST over a month, the website of the Guyana Cricket Board has been quite visibly defaced by hackers who demanded US$1,000 in Bitcoin.

The defacement took the form of a warning and demand, stating partly, “Your company was hacked due to major security issues and your documents, contracts, work correspondence ended up in our possession, we would love to forget this incident but we cannot, so your business partners should not suffer because of your negligence to security.”

It’s kind of weird when a definitive statement about the importance of cybersecurity comes from the people who broke into your digital house.

I’ve been trying to understand the studious calm that’s followed the TSTT breach. What collective noun to describe an industry-wide gathering of potential victims ardently burrowing for good soil to stick their heads into.

So I’ve decided on apathy, as in an apathy of cybersecurity concerns.

Consider the Blue Waters breach in December 2023, which dropped 10GB of that company’s data on the dark web.

The circle of individuals affected by the public distribution of personally identifiable information in that breach was significantly smaller than hundreds of thousands affected by the TSTT data breach, so there was little cause for public concern.

Almost nobody would have been concerned about Mrs Hadeed’s company-related Amazon purchases or the appalling salary of the company’s lone IT employee, but Blue Waters should have been concerned, because what got dumped on the dark web in that breach was a financial and organisational blueprint of how the company does business.

If a competitor decided to create a rival company, say, Black and Blue Waters, they had a ready-made roadmap, from raw materials acquisition to distribution systems to work from.

And that’s probably one of the reasons why the Government has sensibly decided to incentivise a national hardening of the TT digital presence through a tax allowance of $500,000.

In an amendment to the Corporation Tax Act in December, the Government further clarified that the allowance would cover cybersecurity investments between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2025 up to a maximum of $500,000 for both years. The allowance is a deduction on chargeable taxes allowable over the two-year period, and qualifying businesses can file multiple claims during that window of opportunity.

According to iGovTT, since the announcement was made, the agency has fielded questions from accountants responsible for the tax returns of multiple large business clients and questions from smaller businesses seeking a better understanding of how the allowance applies to them.

At a TTMA webinar on Tuesday, Charles Bobb-Semple, deputy CEO of iGovTT, explained other caveats. Companies must be in full compliance with the Registrar General’s office and other necessities of doing business in TT to be eligible for the facility, and successful companies may be audi