Your Comment Was "Inaccurate and Misleading" - PUWU Claps Back at Bawumia Over 'Attack' On ECG Staff
The Public Utilities Workers’ Union (PUWU) of the Trade Union Congress (Ghana) have responded to the allegations made against some ECG staff by the Vice President Dr. Bawumia during the Annual General Meeting of the African Anti-Corruption Agencies in Africa on May 9,2024.
The Public Utilities Workers’ Union (PUWU) of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) strongly disagreed with the Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia’s assertion that some ICT staff of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) sabotaged the government’s digitalisation of revenue collection.
The Vice President on May 9, 2024 alleged that some staff of ECG who work at the IT department sabotaged the digitalized revenue collection process by introducing ransomware to distort the process.
In a rebuttal, the PUWU stated that the assertion of the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia are misleading and inaccurate.
According to the Union, it is disappointing for the vice president to have attributed the improper functioning of the initiative to an act of sabotage from the staff of ECG.
Excerpts from the letter from the PUWU signed by its General Secretary, Mr. Michael Adumatta Nyantakyi read, “The Union respectfully DISAGREES with the statement of His Excellency the Vice President on his presentation relating to digitalization and sabotaging of the ICT system at ECG.”
“In September 2022, EOCO commenced forensic audit on the ECG Power App: They demanded for the payment platform architecture, databases, Application Programming Interface (API) documentation and the power app custom source code, including credentials to the backend prepayment systems. EOCO did not use its internal staff but had to use third-party IT professionals for the assignment. Consequently, it was not only ECG IT staff who had access to the ICT infrastructure of ECG. Could the sharing of the source code with external parties compromised ECG network security in relation to the scale of the September 2022 attack?
“The first ransomware attack, occurred on September 28, 2022 which took a wide scope prompting the need to report the incident to the Cyber Security Authority, as required by regulation. The National Security thereafter took over the ECG ICT system as the attack was seen as a threat to national security.”
The union further added that, “We wish to state that it was the ECG ICT staff who used their system recovery strategy and worked tirelessly day and night to restore the systems and even assisted the National Security operatives on how to operate the ECG systems. The ECG ICT staff led the recovery effort, with the support of E-crime Bureau, a cyber -security firm, invited by ECG Board.”
“In all these cases, the systems were restored with the major assistance by 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.”
“The Union wishes to put on record that the categorical statement made by His Excellency the Vice President was inaccurate and misleading. We wish to indicate that during the attack, personnel of the National Investigation Bureau launched an investigation into the incident of which we are yet to hear a conclusive report on the matter.”
