The Public Utilities Workers Union (PUWU) of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) has described misleading claims by Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia’s that officials of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) sabotaged the government’s digitalization of revenue collection.
The Vice President, speaking at the Annual AGM of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Africa on May 9, accused some workers at the IT unit of introducing ransomware to disrupt the system’s proper functioning.
He claimed that ransomware caused the system to fail.
He added that it took national security to identify the staff responsible for the sabotage.
But responding to the allegations, PUWU said they were “inaccurate and misleading.”
According to the Union, in September 2022, EOCO began a forensic audit on the ECG Power App, requesting the payment platform architecture, databases, API documentation, and the power app custom source code, including backend prepayment system credentials.
It further disclosed that EOCO employed third-party IT professionals for the task, implying that ECG IT staff were not the only ones with access to ECG’s ICT infrastructure.
The statement said the first ransomware attack, which occurred on September 28, 2022, was reported to the Cyber Security Authority, as per regulation.
“In the midst of the takeover, the second and most severe of the ransomware attacks occurred on November 11, 2022. At the time, National Security personnel had both full physical access and software administrative rights to all ECG systems. The National Security Service arrested and detained some ECG and ICT staff for days but were later released.”
It was the ECG ICT staff who led the system recovery effort, working day and night to restore the systems and even assisting National Security operatives on how to operate the ECG systems with support from the E-crime Bureau, a cybersecurity firm invited by the ECG Board, it said.
“In all these cases, the systems were restored with the major assistance of the ECG ICT staff. It is therefore factually inaccurate that National Security came in to recover the system, as reported by His Excellency the Vice President.”
Source: rainbowradioonline com
