Thousands of miles away from the Israeli airstrikes raining down on Iran, the Iranian hacker group Homeland Justice is chipping away at the digital infrastructure of a southern European country.

Homeland Justice, a group the Albanian government has directly tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), launched a cyberattack on the capital of Tirana on Friday, saying it was “just the beginning” in a post on Telegram.

“Tirana’s municipal services were paralyzed and it was all your own choice,” the group said, referring to Albania hosting about 3,000 members of an exiled Iranian opposition group.

“Your actions will cost you a heavy price,” the group said in a string of ominous messages on the messaging app, sharing screenshots of server login credentials, the names and details of employees as well as the personal details of Tirana residents.

Albania has been the headquarters of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, better known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, since 2013 when the U.S. government requested that a camp be built to host the exiled opposition group that participated in the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and then clashed with the Revolutionary Guard.

A special-purpose camp was built in Manëz, and was visited by U.S. officials including then-Vice President Mike Pence. In 2023, Albanian police raided the camp after receiving information that a unit of the Iranian Quds Force was operating there and trying to subvert it.

The capital’s website remained down Saturday afternoon and the server outage could cause disruptions across transportation services, the issuance of passports and licenses — and expose the sensitive personal data of nearly 800,000 Tirana residents.

“The past 10 to 12 years have shown that public institutions are easily hackable and that the Albanian government has not appreciated the issue of cybersecurity at all,” said Edmond Liçaj, a cybersecurity expert.

Liçaj said Albania has a “criminally low” sensitivity to the seriousness of personal data leaks. Such leaks are still seen as little more than “routine annoyances,” he said, despite the government’s push to digitalize its services as the current EU membership frontrunner in the Balkans.

“Albania has been under attack since 2008, and year after year, data has been released, both through attacks and even through physical theft of servers, unheard of in the history of attacks,” Liçaj said.

The Albanian government didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

In 2022, the Albanian government hired Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team to investigate the cyberattacks, which included the data of everyone who had entered or exited the country in 17 years and the electronic communications of government officials, who concluded the attacks were linked to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.