An Edmonton blogger gained access to the Alberta government's 2010 budget website the night before the budget was revealed.

Mack Male could have made a fortune if he knew how to play the markets with that information, unfortunately he didn't. Apparently he visited http://budget2010.alberta.ca as a logical guess for the location of this year's site, given that http://budget2009.alberta.ca was last year's address.

A log-in screen prompted Male for a username and password, so he entered "administrator" and "password"-- common default log-in information. While Male didn't find any budget documents on the website, but he was able to navigate pages that showed information placeholders. Apparently when he tried again next day someone had changed the password. Alberta Finance spokesman Bart Johnson said.An information technology team is looking into what happened.  But nothing in the budget was compromised, Johnson added.

Alberta's auditor general Fred Dunn. Dunn slammed  the level of security on Alberta's government computer networks in an October 2008 report. This time he is a bit more muted.  He said that a  more secure password would be expected for information that should be protected, there is little reason to be concerned about someone gaining access to an empty website.