As authorized hashish has expanded round america for each leisure and medical use, corporations have amassed troves of knowledge about clients and their transactions. Individuals who have utilized for medical marijuana playing cards have needed to share notably private well being knowledge to qualify. For some sufferers in Ohio who use medical weed, a current knowledge publicity might impression their delicate data.
Safety researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered a publicly accessible database in mid-July that appeared to comprise medical information, psychological well being evaluations, doctor experiences, and pictures of IDs like driver’s licenses for folks looking for medical hashish playing cards. The 323GB trove saved near one million information, together with Social Safety numbers, electronic mail addresses, bodily addresses, dates of delivery, and medical knowledge—all organized by title.
Based mostly on data that appeared to explain particular staff and enterprise companions, Fowler suspected that the info belonged to the Ohio-based firm Ohio Medical Alliance LLC, which works 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 analyze this alleged incident. We take knowledge safety very significantly and are wanting into this matter.”
“There have been physicians’ experiences that might say what the underlying downside was—whether or not it was nervousness, most cancers, HIV, or one thing else. In some circumstances, the candidates would submit their very own medical information as proof” of their qualifying situation, Fowler tells WIRED. “I noticed identification paperwork from a number of states, from in every single place. And I even noticed offender launch playing cards, that are mainly IDs for individuals who simply bought out of jail that they submitted as proof of identification to get a medical marijuana card.”
Fowler says that a lot of the recordsdata within the database had been picture codecs like PDFs, JPGs, and PNGs. One CSV plaintext doc referred to as “workers feedback” seemed to be an export of inside communications, appointment histories, notes about purchasers, and software standing. That file additionally contained extra then 200,000 electronic mail addresses of Ohio Medical Alliance staff, enterprise associates, and clients.
Databases which might be misconfigured and have inadvertently been left publicly uncovered on the open web are a widespread downside on-line despite efforts to lift consciousness in regards to the mistake and its privateness implications.
