Three officials penalized for high-profile data leak

RIGA - The State Revenue Service has announced that three officials from the Electronic Declaration System will be penalized for allowing a loophole in the system through which a hacker was able to steal and distribute sensitive information.

Department head Iveta Bertulsone and her deputies Viesturs Skils and Juris Stumps have been given administrative penalties of 20 percent salary reductions.

April and May this year Latvia was swept with tales of a hacker - who went only by the name of "neo" - who accessed the Electronic Delecration System and made public the tax declerations of numerous high-profile politicians and businessmen. Within days of the news becoming public the hacker had been transformed into a folk hero, referred to by many local news outlets as "the Latvian Robin Hood."

A 31-year-old researcher at the AI Laboratory of the University of Latvia's Institute of Mathematics and Information Sciences named Ilmars Poikans on May 13 confessed to being the hacker and now faces as much as 10 years behind bars.

The data shows that top executives of the municipal companies received huge monthly salaries — 4,000 lats (€5,700) and higher — as enormous bonuses, including 16,000 lats (€22,500) to Riga Heat CEO Aris Zigurs last March, went through while regular employees took wage reductions in light of budget cuts.

National news agency LETA reprorted that a total of 7,483,140 XML files had been illegally downloaded from the EDS from October 29, 2009 to February 3 this year.