Updated There's red faces at the office of the Data Protection Commissioner this morning after a blogger lifted an upcoming official report off its website and published it early.

As a result, data from the Data Protection Commissioner's Annual Report was published on a local blog on Wednesday a day before its official release on Thursday morning, state broadcaster RTE reports.

The mechanism of the "hack" is unclear, but one likely theory is that a staffer made the report available for download even though it wasn't included in the site's index.

The Data Protection Commissioner is supposed to act as a privacy watchdog so any security breach, however minor, is embarrassing. ®

Update

Damian Mulley, the blogger who found the report, has been in touch to explain that no hacking was involved.

"The document was already uploaded to the site, just not linked to from the front page. Given that when they publish a document it is linked to as documentID=xxx I just added a one to the most recent document and thar she blowed," he explained.

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