As authorized hashish has expanded round america for each leisure and medical use, corporations have amassed troves of information about clients and their transactions. Individuals who have utilized for medical marijuana playing cards have needed to share significantly private well being knowledge to qualify. For some sufferers in Ohio who use medical weed, a latest knowledge publicity might impression their delicate info.
Safety researcher Jeremiah Fowler found a publicly accessible database in mid-July that appeared to comprise medical data, psychological well being evaluations, doctor reviews, and pictures of IDs like driver’s licenses for individuals looking for medical hashish playing cards. The 323GB trove saved near one million data, together with Social Safety numbers, electronic mail addresses, bodily addresses, dates of delivery, and medical knowledge—all organized by title.
Primarily based on info that appeared to explain particular workers and enterprise companions, Fowler suspected that the info belonged to the Ohio-based firm Ohio Medical Alliance LLC, which fits by the title Ohio Marijuana Card. Fowler contacted the corporate on July 14; when he checked the database the subsequent day, it had been secured and was now not publicly accessible on-line. Fowler didn’t obtain a response about his submission.
Ohio Medical Alliance didn’t reply WIRED’s questions on Fowler’s findings. At one level, although, the corporate’s president, Cassandra Brooks, wrote in an electronic mail: “I would like time to research this alleged incident. We take knowledge safety very critically and are wanting into this matter.”
“There have been physicians’ reviews that will say what the underlying drawback was—whether or not it was nervousness, most cancers, HIV, or one thing else. In some instances, the candidates would submit their very own medical data as proof” of their qualifying situation, Fowler tells WIRED. “I noticed identification paperwork from plenty of states, from in every single place. And I even noticed offender launch playing cards, that are principally IDs for individuals who simply received out of jail that they submitted as proof of identification to get a medical marijuana card.”
Fowler says that many of the recordsdata within the database had been picture codecs like PDFs, JPGs, and PNGs. One CSV plaintext doc known as “employees feedback” gave the impression to be an export of inner communications, appointment histories, notes about purchasers, and utility standing. That file additionally contained extra then 200,000 electronic mail addresses of Ohio Medical Alliance workers, enterprise associates, and clients.
Databases which can be misconfigured and have inadvertently been left publicly uncovered on the open web are a typical drawback on-line despite efforts to boost consciousness concerning the mistake and its privateness implications.