Head of the Permanent Electoral Authority (AEP) Toni Grebla declared that next week he will order the appropriate measures against the staff who are guilty of the cyber security incident occurred on Thursday morning with the Authority, which left the lists of the electoral experts of a certain county - their personal ID numbers included - freely accessible for about one hour. Grebla specified that one person's negligence and lack of vigilance by some other three employees were behind the incident.

In a phone-in with broadcaster Digi 24, Grebla said that as the AEP staff left work at 03:00 in the morning because the night before they had to check the lists of the EP candidates, the last of which was submitted after 23:00, fatigue took its toll and for one of roughly 46 constituencies, the lists of the electoral experts with the respective electoral offices were sent via the Authority's public mail, instead of the secure email used by a single authorized person from an AEP County Directorate.

Grebla said the incident was detected and fixed one hour later, and the email was accessed by approximately 30 people. "What is regrettable is that the table with the 1,300 electoral experts for the respective county also had their personal ID numbers listed, this was the only type of personal information that accidentally went public, because the nominal list is also displayed at the Central Electoral Bureau," he said.

The AEP head insisted that this is not a security breach or a cyber attack, but "the regrettable, unforgivable carelessness" of an employee, occurred due to fatigue caused by the intense work of the previous days.

"I immediately informed the Personal Data Protection Authority, as the law requires, I opened an investigation, and on Monday I will order the appropriate measures against the people whose neglectful action caused the leak of this email," Grebla declared. AGERPRES (RO - author: Daniel Florea, editor: Georgiana Tanasescu; EN - editor: Simona Klodnischi)