BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Jan. 25, 2018– Belize is not immune from cyber-attack in today’s brave new electronic world, but legislation and preventative action on the part of system managers to combat this reality have still not been sufficiently developed to meet the challenge.

Credible information to Amandala this week is that there was a massive cyber-attack on the Heritage Bank credit card system, resulting in a temporary halt in service to thousands of customers who use the bank’s credit card.

Over the past weekend, employees of the bank reportedly were busy remaking several thousand customers’ credit cards after their system was compromised by the cyber-attack, or the threat of an attack.

Amandala attempted to get a comment from the bank, but all of our efforts were futile.

We were directed to speak to a particular senior employee of the bank, but each time we called, we were unable to reach that person, who, we were told, was on lunch break, even at some odd hours.

Late this morning, we were finally able to speak to the person to whom we had been referred, at the bank’s main office on Princess Margaret Drive.

When we related what we knew about the cyber-attack and asked the individual what measures had the bank put in place to prevent such an attack from recurring, the person was hesitant to comment and told us that she was not able to address that question.

She told us that we would have to speak to the bank’s managing director, who would not be in office today.