The prime minister of Albania has issued a public apology after the personal data of hundreds of thousands of Albanian citizens was allegedly leaked online.

An Excel file containing what appears to be data relating to employees in the public and private sectors was found circulating on social media and has reportedly been broadly shared through messaging apps. 

Personal information allegedly exposed in the file includes the monthly salaries, job titles, employer names, and ID numbers of approximately 637,138 individuals.

BIRN reports that while an investigation by the Tirana Prosecutor’s Office to verify the authenticity of the data remains ongoing, suspicions have been raised that the information was leaked from either Albania’s tax service or its Social Insurance Institute. 

Speaking on Thursday, Albania’s prime minster, Edi Rama, apologized for the security incident, which he said did not appear to be the result of malicious action by an external threat actor.

“According to a preliminary analysis, it looks more like an internal infiltration rather than an outside . . . cyber-attack,” Rama told a press conference.

He added: “I have an idea that this was done to create confusion and animosity between the people and (the government).”

Government spokesman Endri Fuga said that an initial examination of the file’s contents suggested that the document had been formed through the “merger of several different pieces” of data. Fuga added that no digital export of the state payroll database had taken place. 

President Ilir Meta described the publication of the list as “a flagrant violation of freedoms, human rights and dignity, laws and the constitution” and called for Albanian authorities to investigate the leak and discover who had executed it.

Meta said: “The personal data of every citizen, which is stored by public institutions and administered in state databases, is personal, protected by law and intended to be used only for the benefit of citizens and the state only.

“Any other use of it is a criminal act, which endangers the social order by violating the private security of every citizen.”

The alleged data leak follows a similar security incident in April in which the personal data of 910,000 voters in Tirana was exposed to the media.

Russia has slapped American tech company Google with a record-breaking fine for failing to remove “banned content.” 

A Russian court issued the $100m financial penalty on Friday in response to Google’s alleged “systematic failure to remove banned content.”

Although the financial penalty is the largest fine of its kind ever to be issued by a Russian court, it reportedly represents a mere 6.7% of the amount of money Google made in Russia last year. 

The court set the fine at $100m after being informed by Russia’s internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, that Google’s annual revenue in Russia in 2020 exceeded 85 billion rubles (approximately $1.5bn). This is the first time Russian authorities have calculated such a fine based on a tech company’s turnover.

Friday’s court order is not the first time Russia has financially penalized Google over content. In 2018, the tech company was fined 500,000 rubles (around $6,800), chiefly for failing to remove content in which opposition leader Alexei Navalny called for demonstrations to be made against Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

The same offense landed Google with fines of 700,000 rubles and 1.5 million rubles in 2019 and 2020, respectively. This time last year, a Russian court found Google guilty of repeatedly failing to delete search results “containing information prohibited in Russia” and fined the company three million rubles (around $41,000).

Russian journalist Alexander Plushev speculated on social media that Friday’s markedly larger fine “may indicate that the political decision to expel Western services from Russia has been made.”

Speaking during a news conference on Thursday, Putin did not rule out blocking a social network or internet company from operating in Russian cyber-space if they disregarded the country’s laws. 

Google has been given 10 days to lodge an appeal against the penalty. The company’s press service said it would decide whether to appeal after studying the court documents. 

The fine follows legislation signed into law by Putin in July that requires large social media companies that operate in Russia to open an office in the country by January 1, 2022, and maintain a physical presence there. Failure to comply with the law could result in restrictions or total bans.