ON 24 July 2025, Curaçao’s Tax and Customs Administration reported ransomware on its network, with counter services, the call centre and internal processes largely unavailable for more than a week. The Joint Court of Justice—which serves Curaçao, Aruba, Sint Maarten, Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius—also went down the day before, meaning a single intrusion degraded the judicial system across six jurisdictions at once.
The incident illustrates a defining Caribbean security trait: a single platform and a multi-jurisdictional footprint can magnify impact when exploitation occurs.
The article highlights a “speed gap” between exposure and containment. Fortinet’s 2026 Global Threat Intelligence Report (Midyear Edition) cites roughly 325 million attack attempts in 2025 across English-speaking Caribbean targets, with critical vulnerabilities being exploited within 24–48 hours of disclosure, a sharp acceleration from earlier norms. IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report shows mean time to identify and contain a breach at 247 days, moving in the opposite direction from prior improvement.
The piece argues that third‑party assurance continues on an annual cycle, ill-suited to a threat landscape where updates are needed within days. Practical responses proposed include measuring remediation against exploit velocity, replacing annual attestations with continuous evidence, enforcing segmentation and compensating controls, and instrumenting federated paths and shared providers.
It cautions that stolen credentials remain the primary route into cloud environments, and that “the tail” of exposure often sits beyond traditional assurance windows.